Singular Pasts

Carlotta Sorba, author of Politics and Sentiments in Risorgimento Italy: Melodrama and the Nation:
In this engaging book, Traverso guides us through the innumerable narrations of the past by contemporary writers and historians. Focusing on their interactions, he outlines what he deems a significant phenomenon in current historical writing: the growing intrusiveness of subjectivity and personal experience undermining a choral vision of the past.

Dominick LaCapra, author of Understanding Others: Peoples, Animals, Pasts:
Enzo Traverso has written an important book about first-person, more or less subjective and hybridized history—a much discussed and debated approach that has risen to prominence in the recent past. His erudite, insightful analysis extends more broadly to address questions about the very nature of history and its relations to other areas such as literature and film. It should interest not only historians but all humanists and social scientists as well as the general reader.

Geoff Eley, author of Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930-1945:
How do historians place themselves in history? Should the historical be personal? With his familiar acuity of vision, breadth of erudition, and generosity of thought, Enzo Traverso supplies a rich array of answers to these abiding questions—usually boundary-crossing, sometimes surprising, always grounded in a carefully considered politics of knowledge