True, but this is not the issue. Th

True, but this is not the issue. The problem has become acute because of our growing awareness of the shaping presence of rhetoric in all discourse. Thirty years ago literary studies and the social sciences were in separate compartments; in each the work of the other was more or less ignored. Literary critics studied rhetoric and fictional representation, and historians made representations of the past without considering that these also were rhetorical and in form were even, in many cases, like literary fictions. Now, however, as rhetorical study has intensified in literary scholarship and as awareness of it has spread to other fields, the problem of the rhetorical distortion of history and literary history seems much more serious than it once did. If I am interested in making accurate representations in literary history, to say that rhetoric controls other discourses equally does not lessen my misgivings.