Abstract

The construction of narrative wholes in historiography involves more than logic, but aesthetics as well. It is imagination as well as logic which generates the more or less concretized images constituting the background onto which the historian, "playing" with basic information, imposes some content and portrays some event by means of a narrative. These concretized images incorporate an aesthetic sense of order. Historical narratives also employ general terms which "bind together" the various elements of basic information which, when linked together, form a historical narrative; these general concepts also invoke an aesthetic sense in virtue of which their identity is formed. In both these ways the aesthetic dimension is crucial in the formation of historical wholes