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The Adaptation of History: Essays on Ways of Telling the Past Laurence Raw and Defne Ersin Tutan, editors Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013. pp. 223
This collection begins with the position that history - stories crafted about the past - is not the preserve of professional historians. History as a practice has conventionally had a rigorous but limited scope. It is typically written, notes Hayden White for example, in one of the main narrative genres honed by novelists, essayists, and thinkers of diverse stripe in the 19th century. Fortunately, there have been considerable shifts in recent decades, and the grip of particular genres and a single medium has loosened. This collection of essays joins that growing chorus.
Ersin Tutan and Raw argue that all stories about the past should be treated as adaptations, by which they mean the range of narratives in which the past is interpreted to speak to present-day concerns. Histories that fail to do so are doomed to Darwinian oblivion. Such a practice is open to all, not only to card-carrying historians. This way of making sense of the past transcends the (irresolvable) problem of accuracy, of what "really happened," and instead turns our attention to the delightful range of ways in...