Imperfect Histories

Ann Rigney is Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution and coeditor of Historians and Social Values.

As a study of a kind of cultural history focused on the 'experience' of the past —and 'experience' is a recurrent term here—Rigney's book is a work of subtle analysis and broad awareness.(American Historical Review) On the whole, Rigney's is an inciting book, stronger on the historical than on the theoretical side, but rich in knowledge and information, useful in the range of topics it approaches, and generally judicious in its ideas.(Modern Language Quarterly) Rigney opens this fascinating, persuasive study by defining the features of history writing as 'compromise, failure, provisionality, and dissatisfaction.'... Rigney's dense and illuminating footnotes and her extensive bibliography testify to the research she undertook in literary and historical theory and in contemporaneous and contemporary criticism.(Choice) Rigney's principle of selection is novel, and conscientiously pursued; the questions is excludes are also questions it has made newly visible.(European Romantic Review)