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Frank Ankersmit's narrative substance: A legacy to historians

This essay is not intended as a critique of Ankersmit's theorisations, neither in the general nor in the particular. Rather, it will focus on Ankersmit's concept of the narrative substance at an explanatory level only, expressly in order to advance the arguments herein. To be more precise, I will explore two very significant points which, it appears to me, unquestionably arise out of this specific element of Ankersmit's wider thesis. In doing so I hope to illustrate the inescapable centrality of language in historical theory – a matter which has been pushed to one side, or wholly excluded, following the recent fashionable growth of interest in memory and experience studies.