Memory,History and Literature

Abstract

Based on memory,history preserves what has forever gone and disappeared in a permanent record.History is a story about the past and,like literary narrative,is put together in a coherent structure with a number of rhetorical devices.Contemporary Western literary theory has put much emphasis on the similarity between historical and literary narratives,but its extreme formulations have the dangerous tendency of erasing the difference between history and literature,or reality and fiction.More recently there have appeared some works in Western literary criticism that reexamine the trajectories of 20 th-century literary theory,and it is now time for us to rethink such important concepts as reality,history,representation,the relationship between literature and history,etc.,and to avoid extreme positions in order to achieve a new,and more sensible balance.