Terms such as poetics, rhetoric, and narrative have been found rather frequently in discussions of the nature of historical knowledge, reflecting not only past concerns about specificities of history, but also the new contours of the discussion of historical narrative in the last decades of the 20th century. Based on the treatment of this topic by renowned humanities scholars, we propose a rereading emphasizing how the existing thoughts on this field have resulted in a broad redirection of the theoretical questions related to this discipline, especially when the narrative is conceived as an element of human life, going beyond the boundaries of text production. A deeper reflection on the discussion of narrative suggests that considerations on the nature of historical knowledge can hardly be restricted to or neglect the existence of a purely epistemological plane.
epistemology of history; narrative; rhetoric; poetics; hermeneutics.