I am well aware that some will regard my use of it as faddish, and it is of course true that ‘story’ is a central feature of postmodern criticism, with its rejection of the anti-traditional, anti-story attitude of the Enlightenment. But I do not wish, in using this category, to buy wholesale into postmodernism itself. On the contrary: whereas postmodernism sometimes uses ‘story’ as a means whereby one may talk about something other than space-time reality, I have tried to integrate it within the ‘critical-realist’ epistemology expounded in Part II, and to use it as a way forward in history and
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