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Structural postmodernists had foreseen a resolution of the crisis of modernity in a static postmodernity. Historiography, although untouched in its epistemological infrastructure, would have to tailor its accounts to fit into the now limited postmodernist framework of human experience. Since the late 1960s, poststructuralist postmodernists have argued the case of a quite different postmodernity. In its simplest meaning the term poststructuralism referred to the chronological fact that the postmodernism which appeared after structuralism had waned. Claude Levi-Strauss's anthropological version had lost its prominence and the version of Roland Barthes had stopped working strictly in the mode of structuralist linguistics and literature. As in the case of structural postmodernism, the term poststructuralist postmodernism was not chosen because a uniform group of scholars set out to revise the thinking about modernity and progress in accord with a well-formulated, unified program. All of them, however, shared in a profound disenchantment with the main tenets of modernity: that full rationality would provide complete knowledge and that one of its important results would be a beneficial and complete control over human destiny.

For one group of scholars, poststructuralist postmodernism's influence on history came in the context of a long-standing debate: the one about the role of the narrative in history. The key issue in the debate was the historians' insistence on a strict separation of historical from fictional accounts (in modern terms, of historiography from literature). Aristotle's dictum that poetics was superior to history because it treated general rather than specific human situations has reverberated throughout the centuries. Historians would protest that the dictum was at least half wrong. In the nineteenth century, the so-called literary historians considered language to be the neutral medium in which findings about the past were symbolically expressed. Via style, language was granted a limited active role in constructing historical accounts.

Since the 1980s, the term metanarrative has replaced the formerly used phrase philosophy of history. The prefix meta (Greek for beyond) indicated a narrative that overarched other narratives. Like a philosophy of history, it linked smaller historical accounts together to a single narrative that stretched over long periods of time, if not all of history. Yet the use of the term metanarrative indicated more than a mere change in terminology. It signified the ascendancy of a way to make sense of history in accord with the postmodernist concept of truth. Philosophers of history had seen their task as the discovery of the overall meaning inherent in past events by discerning the permanent structures and forces at work in them. Metanarratives were seen, like all concepts and narratives, as linguistic constructs, which disclaimed any link to objective schemes of order and meaning. Such a link was blamed for all claims to a privileged position, illegitimate in terms of the poststructuralist postmodernist concept of truth.