A Comparison Between Literary Narrative and Historical Narrative

Scholars of the humanities regard the relations and differences between literature and history as a controversial issue for years. This paper tries to trace back the different concepts about literary narrative and historical narrative, and establish a theoretical starting point for the comparison between them. The author firstly analyzes the meanings of History and Historical Philosophy. On this basis, through a review of thoughts of different schools especially of the new-historicism, the author discusses the similarities in narrative interests and fictitious methods of literature and history, and the differences in the narrative contents. The author points out that the comprehensive relations of literature and history will take new methodology for the literary studies in the 21th century.