The Relative Decline Of The Non-normative Historiography Prosperity And Normative History And Its Problems,

Since the 1990's, a very embarrassing phenomenon has appeared for professional historians: while on the one hand, normative historiography has been fading out the public's perspective and has been declining in its cultural status, non-normative historiography, on the other, has been pervasive on the cultural market, with quite a number of non-normative works especially misrepresented and misleading ancient court dramas taking the major role in interpreting the history. Many scholars have made pertinent and exquisite commentary on this. However, most of them have made profound analysis and criticism on non-normative historiography's severe distortion of the history and vending of spiritual scum from the viewpoint of history instead of from the broader viewpoint of systematic, theoretic and academic approach and generalization. This article, adopting the statistic analysis and based on the rationale of historical materialism, tries to make precise and scientific investigation into the interactivity between academic history and social history. It tries to explore a new prospect for the function and breakthrough of historiography while exploring the fundamental reasons of such phenomenon.The article includes three parts apart from the introduction.The introduction generalizes the various schools of study and makes an introduction to the present achievement made by the academia on this subject. Its expresses the scenario of selecting this subject as the target subject and define normative historiography and non-normative historiography.Part Ⅰ delineates the dominant position of non-normative historiography, combs the disputes over this, and analyzes and investigates non-normative historiography itself and its origin.Part Ⅱ gives a comprehensive description on the basic development trend of normative historiography and discloses its internal conflicts as well as its declination ascompared with non-normative historiography.Part III, based on the above analysis, makes a tentative approach to solving the problems of normative historiography and non-normative historiography and makes a summary on their interaction."The value of history lies in the process that it develops." This is the guiding principle of the conception and composition of this article. If we take history as a scenario, the content and form that manifest it will be decisive to its impact. "History cannot be put behind." It should represent knowledge as well as intelligence. It should re-present a realist past instead of a beautified but distorted world.