The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the “Linguistic Turn”

Abstract

History, Hayden White remarks, has no distinctively historical method, but borrows its models and methods from a variety of other disciplines. These disciplines, however, have varied over time. Latenineteenth-century German historiography looked to the rigorous procedures of the natural sciences to reconstruct the past “as it actually happened“; mid-twentieth-century historians turned to the social sciences, especially to anthropology and sociology, fortheirmodels and methods. More recently, historians' appropriation of (and experimentation with) concepts derived from literary and critical theory has occasioned much heated discussion within the field.