Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian's Language

Ankersmit's central category is the narratio, "a broadly defined form which contains many specific modes of discourse. . . . The three themes of narrative logic are (1) that there are no translation rules for reality, (2) that it is the whole of the narratio, rather than the sum of its narrative sentences, which is a narrative substance and gives us an interpretation of the past, and (3) that there is a similarity between historical and metaphoric statements. . . . It is not the 'past,' but our understanding of narrative substances, which has a narrative structure; even if the 'past' did have a narrative structure, we could not know this because there are no translation rules that might verify some correspondence between the 'past' and the narrative substances." (#Kellner, Language and Historical Representation, 311‑12)

See also the review by #McCullagh in History and Theory 23 (1984): 394‑403. (Abstract via Allan Megill)