Abstract

The author demonstrates the nucleus of historical method in the positivistic primacy of the 'fact'. The absence of a problematic perspective on the relationship between fact and interpretation constitutes an element of weakness, but other aspects of historical method are innovative and rich in developments: the concept of research as a collective project; the attention to the connections between history and geography, between art and society, between the real and the imaginary, between criticism and philology. The topic of popular literature and its origins acquires moreover particular relevance in historical method: a subject destined to project its suggestive influence on the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, until gradually the cult of history changes into the myth of anti-history.