History is what happened in the past; it cannot change just because of the ways that later generations view it. However, the question of how to narrate a “true” history is not easy to answer, because historical narratives are often influenced by the narrators, as well as the social contexts in which they are situated. Rather than exploring narrative techniques that might help us get closer to the truth, this chapter offers a heuristic experiment: since the social contexts of different narrators give rise to different historical narratives, perhaps we can get a better look at the narrators themselves and their social contexts by observing them through the lens of their divergent narratives about the same events.

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Observing Narrators and Their Societies Through the Lens of Historical Narratives: The Story of an Insurgent from Southern Hunan

  • Tan Tongxue

摘要

History is what happened in the past; it cannot change just because of the ways that later generations view it. However, the question of how to narrate a “true” history is not easy to answer, because historical narratives are often influenced by the narrators, as well as the social contexts in which they are situated. Rather than exploring narrative techniques that might help us get closer to the truth, this chapter offers a heuristic experiment: since the social contexts of different narrators give rise to different historical narratives, perhaps we can get a better look at the narrators themselves and their social contexts by observing them through the lens of their divergent narratives about the same events.