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Abstract
‘Metahistorical romance’ is postmodernist historical fiction which is obsessed with historiographical questions in a self-reflexive mode. This fiction both continues and reverses the dominant of the historical romance genre associated with the work of Scott. It also rehearses many of the perspectives on history found in postmodern historiography. The central characteristic of metahistorical romance is pursuit of the historical sublime, which it confronts as repetition and deferral. After generally illustrating correspondences between this postmodern genre and postmodern historiographical perspectives, the article investigates correspondences between sublime history and dialogical history and explores ways in which the metahistorical romance may be said to construct history as dialogical. Dialogical history, while impossible in a literal sense, may still offer useful alternatives to dialectical models of history and radical postmodernist scepticism.
