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The term Critical Historiography is used by various scholars in recent decades to emphasize the ambiguous relationship between history writing and historiography. Traditionally, historiography was seen as the study of the history-of-history or as a very specialized form of history writing. Increasingly there are those who view history writing in reverse, namely as a specialized form of historiography. A type of Critical Historiography can be seen, for example, in the work of Harold Bloom. In his Map of Misreading,in which he argued that poets should not be seen as autonomous agents of creativity, but rather as part of a history that transcends their own production and that to a large degree gives it shape. The historian can try to stabilize poetic production so as to better understand the work of art, but can never completely extract the historical subject from history. Also among those who argue for the primacy of historiography are Mark Jarzombek. The site of his work is on disciplinary production rather than poetic production, as for Bloom. Since psychology – ever since it became a more or less official science in the 1880s - is now so pervasive, so Jarzombek argued, but yet so difficult to pinpoint, the traditional dualism of subjectivity and objectivity has become not only highly ambiguous, but also the site of a complex negotiation that needs to take place between the historian and the discipline. The issue, for Jarzombek, is particular poignant in the fields of art and architectural history, the principal subject of the book. Pierre Nora's notion of "ego-histories," also moves in the direction of critical historiography. The idea of these histories is to bring into focus the relationship between a historian's personality and his/her life choices in the writing of history.

• Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973; 2d ed., 1997. ISBN
• H. Bloom, A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.
• Mark Jarzombek, "Critical Historiography," in The Psychologizing of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
• Pierre Nora, Essais d'ego-histoire (Gallimard), 1987