Key Metaphors for History: Mirrors of Time (Routledge Approaches to History)

by: Javier Feández-Sebastián (Author)
Edition: 1st

Publication Date: 3 April 2024

Language: English

Print Length: 350 pages

ISBN-10: 1138354465

ISBN-13: 9781138354463

Book Description

This book casts a fresh look at what to date has been a relatively unexplored question: the enormous value and usefulness of the metaphor in the understanding and writing of history (and at the historical culture reflected by these metaphors). Mapping a wide range of tropes present in historiography and public discourse, the book identifies some of the key metaphorical resources employed by historians, politicians, and joualists to represent time, history, memory, the past, the present, and the future and examines a selection of analytical concepts of a temporal nature, built upon unmistakeably metaphorical foundations, such as modeity, event, process, revolution, crisis, progress, decline, or transition.The analysis of these and other pillars on which mode history has been built, whether as a philosophy of history, as an academic discipline, or as a set of events, will interest graduates and scholars dealing with the historical and social sciences and the humanities in general.Key Metaphors for History offers a broad overview of historiography and historiosophy, from an unfrequented point of view, halfway between conceptual history, theory of history and metaphorology. Moreover, it constitutes a form of self-reflection of the historian on his or her own positionality when researching and writing history.
About the Author Javier Feández-Sebastián is Professor Emeritus at the University of the Basque Country. He has worked extensively on conceptual history and has recently been interested in the theory of history. His latest publications include: Historia conceptual en el Atlántico ibérico (2021), Metafóricas espacio-temporales para la historia (2021) and Tiempos de la historia, tiempos del derecho (2021).