Issue Details: First known date: 2009... 2009 The Poetics and Practicalities of Writing
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Inga Clendinnen, an outstanding and imaginative historian, recently confessed that when she asked a class of new history graduates which historians they read for pleasure, they laughed! ‘I knew why they laughed’, she explained sadly. It’s because so many scholars compromise communication with pompous posturing; they are too busy staking out intellectual territory and warding others off it; they are too busy digging in their fields isolating ‘stone-hard, stone-cold facts’ to bother looking up or around; they are so furiously in pursuit of ‘objectivity’ that they delete themselves from their scripts and employ a weird, passionless prose. Clendinnen says that she enjoys reading great historians, like E.P. Thompson, for the same reason she enjoys reading great novelists—they offer an entrée into richly imagined worlds. But, she confesses, there is a difference. For her, when reading non-fiction, the bliss is tempered and intensified by a critical alertness and an undertow of moral implication not present in what she calls ‘the limpid realms of fiction’.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

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    y separately published work icon Writing Histories: Imagination and Narration Ann Curthoys (editor), Ann McGrath (editor), Clayton : School of Historical Studies, School of Historical Studies, Monash University , 2000 Z1664714 2000 anthology criticism

    'For anyone wanting to write histories that capture the imagination and challenge the intellect. A useful text for teachers and students in history-writing classes.' (Publication summary)

    Clayton : Monash University Press , 2009
Last amended 24 Feb 2017 14:20:43
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