The boundaries of learning have been blurred and every branch of knowledge extends its limit into one another. It is agreed that no alienated study with uniquely authentic authority exists in the world. It seems natural for 'written history' and 'literature' to frequent each other's boundary because both are based on language, which constructs discourse or story with rhetorical devices. This paper, in the literary eyes, observes the process through which the history as story-telling has accepted and affirmed its innate literariness, viewing the historical perceptions from Ranke to White. The argument of this paper is that the unavoidable reciprocity which exists between historical imagination and literary inventiveness makes history and literature intercommunicate with each other. History first refers to both past happenings and the [rigorous and impartial] recording of them, and it is also related with the study of them. The past happenings are, in other words, the human experiences of the transitional process on the social level as well as on the individual. Historians, who had stuck to 'the objectivity and the scientific positivity' of history for ages, became conscious of the illusion to which they adhered and of the 'linguistic and subjective' fearures in historical writing, so have recognised and embraced the innate literariness in history. Through the period of poststructuralism, deconstructive language contributed to revealing the artificialness of history, and postmodern historians such as Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra have declared the fictiveness and the literariness in historical writings. By considering simultaneously both on the reciprocal constructiveness and on the fundamental separateness between history and literature, one would reach the rationalization about the interdependent supplementation of both. While history is for revealing facts, the fictional discourse of literature would rather unveil the hidden truth behind the facts, since the historical truth can be different from the revealed fact. Accordingly, the history and the literature, keeping based on each position, can share the burden of telling the truth of the past.
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