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What legitimate form can history take when faced by the severe challenges issued in recent years by literary, rhetorical, multiculturalist and feminist theories? That is the question considered in this book. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., addresses the essential practical concern of contemporary historians; he offers a way actually to go about reading and writing histories in light of the many contesting theories. Berkhofer ranges through a vast archive of recent writings by a broad range of authors. He explicates the opposing paradigms and their corresponding dilemmas by presenting in dialogue form the positions of modernists and postmodernists, formalists and deconstructionists, textualists and contextualists. Poststructuralism, the New Historicism, the New Anthropology, the New Philosophy of History - these and many other approaches are examined in these interdisciplinary explorations. From them Berkhofer arrives at a clear vision of the forms historical discourse might take, advocates an approach to historical criticism, and proposes new forms of historical representation that encompass multiculturalism, poetics and reflexive (con)textualization. He blends traditional and new methodology; assesses what the "revival of the narrative" actually entails; considers the politics of disciplinary frameworks; and derives approaches to writing, teaching, reviewing and reading histories.