Although the term “anecdote” entered the modern European languages fairly recently and remains to this day ill‐defined, the short, freestanding accounts of particular events, true or invented, that are usually referred to as anecdotes have been around from time immemorial. They have also always stood in a close relation to the longer, more elaborate narratives of history, sometimes in a supportive role, as examples and illustrations, sometimes in a challenging role, as the repressed of history —“la petite histoire.” Historians' relation to them, in turn, varied from appreciative to dismissive in accordance with their own objectives in writing history. It appears that highly structured anecdotes of the kind that are remembered and find their way into anecdote collections depend on and tend to confirm established views of history, the world, and human nature. In contrast, loosely structured anecdotes akin to the modern fait divers have usually worked to undermine established views and stimulate new ones, either by presenting material known to few and excluded from officially authorized histories, or by reporting “odd” occurrences for which the established views of history, the world, and human nature do not easily account.
In his battle against Time, that enemy of our precarious existence [. . .], it was in photography, also born of an age-old longing to halt the moment, to wrest it from the flux of "durée" in order to "fix" it forever in a semblance of eternity, that Proust found his best ally.-Brassaï 1
ContentsPrefatory Note and Acknowledgments ix 1.x Thomas Annan of Glasgow obvious choice for me. Since my retirement in 1999, I have worked with this innovative publisher on four books and I enthusiastically support the company's Open Access policy.The chief purpose of these brief prefatory remarks is to acknowledge with gratitude both the unfailing support of my colleagues at Princeton-Julie Mellby, Gretchen Oberfranc, the editor of the Princeton University Library Chronicle, and Steve Ferguson, the Curator of Rare Books and Acting Associate University Librarian for Rare Books and Special Collections-and the invaluable advice and assistance I have received from leading experts in the field, notably Ray McKenzie, recently retired from the faculty of the
Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative.We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works.Lionel Gossman is M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Romance Languages (Emeritus) at Princeton University. Most of his work has been on seventeenth and eighteenth-century French literature, nineteenth-century European cultural history, and the theory and practice of historiography.
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