caa a22 4500 386351570 CHVBK 20180307111833.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198901 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0035869X00167851 doi S0035869X00167851 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0035869X00167851 Heywood Colin "Boundless dreams of the Levant”: Paul Wittek, the Geokge-Kreis, and the writing of Ottoman history [Elektronische Daten] [Colin Heywood] That history may be read as literature is an aesthetic judgment, which does not deflect from the essential difference between the two modes. To paraphrase Gibbon, who above all in this context knew what he was talking about, "the end of history is truth ... the end of poetry is pleasure”. History, by definition, must fail to attain its ultimate goal of recreating the past "exactly as it happened”: that such is the case, whether because of the fallibility of the human intellect, or the difficulty (but not impossibility) of constructing history in a non-linear mode, or even - that stock excuse of historians - the doubtful, maybe putatively "fictional” quality of "the sources” - does not mean, as is from time to time suggested, that the attempt should not be made, or that history and fiction are indistinguishable. Intent, in this context, is all, nor should one forget that earlier proponents of fictionalised history may on occasion prove to be somewhat uncomfortable intellectual bedfellows. Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1989 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland Cambridge University Press 121/1(1989-01), 32-50 0035-869X 121:1<32 1989 121 JRA https://doi.org/10.1017/S0035869X00167851 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0035869X00167851 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Heywood Colin NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland Cambridge University Press 121/1(1989-01), 32-50 0035-869X 121:1<32 1989 121 JRA CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge