What is "narrative" or "grand narrative" in history?

Narrative is actually telling a story, telling the cause and effect of an event. There are one or more protagonists, first in one way and then in another. The protagonist can be a person, an organization, a country or even an idea. ? How to describe it? For historians in the nineteenth century, this is not a problem, or a problem that historians should consider. Historians' narratives of historical events and poets' narratives of myths are the same in form, and the difference lies in the content, or the way to obtain the content (see White, 1984: 1). The task of a historian is not to explore how to present his findings, but to collect materials and distinguish his true and false positions-the famous "Quellenkritik" in the famous Ranke historiography. When the historian fully absorbs these historical materials, historical facts will be presented to him, and he only needs to elaborate on them. ? It is difficult for people nowadays to have such self-denial piety.

Grand narrative is widely used in Chinese. If what we are talking about here is grand narrative, it refers to the picture of the development and evolution of human history. Simply put, it is to tell everyone what the law of historical development is, and then explain historical events with existing laws. If the purpose of narrative is to tell the ins and outs of a thing clearly, then grand narrative is to make a consistent explanation of human history. The former is to present history, although there will be some explanations in the presentation; The latter is to explain history, although the explanation should also be presented. Therefore, grand narrative is the basic framework for us to understand history in a sense. Frames help us see something, but they also keep us from seeing something. For example, if we imagine the history of nearly a thousand years as the process of the formation of a nation-state, we will feel that the prototype of modern France has been active in Europe in the 10 century.