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Literary notes about history (AI summary)

The term "history" in literature is employed in a variety of ways, ranging from the literal recording of events and achievements to a more abstract, sometimes ironic, commentary on the human condition. In many works, authors use "history" to denote a structured account of past events—as seen in scholarly or reference texts that meticulously document events or biographies [1, 2, 3]—while other writers invoke history as a cyclic or interpretive force, suggesting that it repeats or that its written record is not fixed [4, 5, 6]. Additionally, history appears as a backdrop for personal and societal change, interweaving narrative with the broader progression of human relations, as illustrated in works that connect individual lives with the unfolding of historical eras [7, 8, 9]. In some texts, the term is even self-reflexively critiqued or used with playful irony, acknowledging its sometimes subjective and mutable nature [10, 11]. Overall, literature harnesses "history" not only to recount facts but also to question the veracity and meaning of what is recorded.
  1. Encoding Revision History 2012-06-03 Started.
    — from A History of Sanskrit Literature by Arthur Anthony Macdonell
  2. Unknown at forty, Grant was one of the most famous generals in history at forty-two.
    — from Pushing to the Front by Orison Swett Marden
  3. Whitaker's Genuine History of the Britons, p. 199.
    — from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
  4. “I guess history repeats itself, Jane.
    — from The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie
  5. This is not history, which has just been written.
    — from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
  6. The history of such reappearances—natural history—is meantime a good subject for observation and experiment.
    — from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana
  7. Even the letters I receive are— Kind letters that betray the heart's deep history, In which we feel the presence of a hand.
    — from The World I Live In by Helen Keller
  8. The progress of his writings is also the history of his life; we have no other authentic life of him.
    — from Laws by Plato
  9. And so the time went by till at last he reached his twenty-fifth birthday, at which date this strange and, in some ways, awful history really begins.
    — from She by H. Rider Haggard
  10. [210] "History," says Voltaire, "is only a parcel of tricks we play with the dead."
    — from History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I
  11. This method betrays itself along the whole history of our personal relations.
    — from Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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