Page "Historiography" Paragraph 5

According to Lawrence Stone, narrative has traditionally been the main rhetorical device used by historians.

In 1979, at a time when the new Social History was demanding a social-science model of analysis, Stone detected a move back toward the narrative.

Stone defined narrative as follows: it is organized chronologically ; it is focused on a single coherent story ; it is descriptive rather than analytical ; it is concerned with people not abstract circumstances ; and it deals with the particular and specific rather than the collective and statistical.

He reported that, " More and more of the ' new historians ' are now trying to discover what was going on inside people's heads in the past, and what it was like to live in the past, questions which inevitably lead back to the use of narrative.