The past, we know, informs us. Its texture has been just as real to its time as we feel the present to be for us. And yet, despite its immense importance for establishing and understanding our identity, the reality of the past is curiously inaccessible. This book assembles seven specialists from the fields of history, cultural studies and literature and allows them to debate, in some cases vigorously, the issues of truth and fiction raised by attempts to recreate the past. The debate highlights the formal mechanisms, the imaginative transformations, the ideological commitments whereby history is constructed.