Major Critical Assumptions History can never provide us with the Truth about the past or give us a completely accurate picture of past events or the world view of a group of people. Instead, history is one of many different discourses or ways of seeing and thinking about the world. History is important but must be situated in the context of other discourses such as sociology, politics, religion, and even literary analysis. Seeks to emphasize the interrelatedness of all human activity, become more critically conscious of our biases and prejudices as scholars, and produce a more complete understanding of a literary work. Seeks to destabilize our conception of what fiction and history are and their relationship to each other.
Fictional texts are historical artifacts.
History can also be seen as a kind of fiction. All accounts of history are always partial and incomplete. Emphasis on the textuality of history. Like literature, it is a story we use to interpret, tell about, make sense of the past and connect it to our own values and experience. To study literature, we may need to employ a variety of discourses including, history, sociology, anthropology, theology, political science, and even the sciences.