SOURCE: Delehanty, Ann T. “God's Hand in History: Racine's Athalie as the End of Salvation Historiography.” Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 28, no. 54 (2001): 155-66.

In the following essay, Delehanty maintains that in his biblical drama Athalie, Racine presents two opposing models of historiography: salvation history and teleological history.

Generally, when we speak of a contemporary historical account, we mean a narrative text that describes, in a logically cohesive fashion, events that took place entirely in the past. The narrator of the account, the historian, must balance conveying the truth of what happened with creating a compelling narrative. In his discussion of the modern, narrative form of history, in The Content of the Form, Hayden White identifies the sign that a historical account may have gone too far in the service of a compelling narrative as “the embarrassment of plot” (21). In other words, reality is presumed to be without a...