Ivan Jablonka is Professor of History at Université Paris 13 and a researcher at Collège de France. He is the author of A History of the Grandparents I Never Had, winner of the Prix du Sénat du livre d'histoire, Prix Guizot de l'Académie française, and Prix Augustin-Thierry des Rendez-vous de l'histoire de Blois; and of Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes (Laetitia or the end of men)], winner of the Le Monde's 2016 Prix littéraire, the 2016 Prix Médicis, and the 2016 Prix des prix. Nathan J. Bracher is Professor of French at Texas A & M University.

Historical scholarship and literary fiction share a trajectory of mutual inspiration that reaches back to antiquity and continued beyond the Early Modern period.... Ivan Jablonka's book makes the important point of bringing this traditional relationship back to mind. He rightly insists that historians should be aware of the common ground they have shared with literary writers and avoid the misconception that reduces literature to fiction.... Much more important is Jablonka's point that contemporary historical scholarship is in need of reform... that the social sciences and history might complete their entry into modernity by catching up on the literary revolution of the novel in the early twentieth century.(H-Soz-Kult) This engaging text reveals the various ways in which history and literature have always been constituted in a dialectical relationship to one another.... It offers a richly detailed and carefully delineated account of the ways that history and literature have inspired and borrowed from one another even as each has sought to define itself in opposition to the other.... Jablonka is certainly right to insist on history's power to unsettle the present..., and he has made a passionate case that its mission and civic function have never been more vital.(AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW)

• IntroductionPart I. The Great Divide1. Historians, Orators, and Writers2. The Novel, Father of History?3. History as Science and "Literary Germs"4. The Return of the Literary RepressedPart II. The Historical Way of Reasoning5. What Is History?6. Writers of History-as-Science7. Approaches to Veridiction8. Fictions of MethodPart III. Literature and the Social Sciences9. From Nonfiction to Literature-as-Truth10. History, a Literature under Constraint?11. The Research Text12. On Scholarship of the Twenty-First Century