The process of narration is structured, as Gerard Genette has shown, on the basis of the fundamental distinction between the "time of history", that is, the natural succession of events, and the "time of narration", which is perceived as "the sequence of linguistic signs that represent these events".

The crucial point for understanding narration as a process is the decryption of the concept of "discourse". "Discourse" does not simply mean the formulation of speech, but also a "body of knowledge" and additionally a "system of communication strategies" with which the agents of this speech exercise power. However, based on this, "discourse" loses its "objectivity", that is, it loses the ability to describe reality directly, as it is formulated "subjectively" - a term that should be taken literally here - as the speech of the social subjects who utter it.

Historiography as a scientific activity cannot be exempted from the process of narration. And this concerns not only writing as a representational process of the past, but primarily the construction of sources as "discourses". Whether it is printed archival material from diplomatic or other state services, material from other official social agents (e.g. political parties, newspapers, etc.), or even oral material, or finally the material construction of the social space itself (e.g. monuments), this material is constituted as narration through the "discourses" formulated by the social subjects. Therefore, historiographical narration is bound by a series of mediations that originate on the one hand from its own "empirical material" and on the other hand from the historian's perspective.

The essays in this volume attempt to specify and elaborate on this problematic regarding the functioning of "discourse" at all levels of historiographical narration, based on the "discourses" that were formulated - and continue to be formulated - about the crucial decade of the 1940s.

The sections included are:
1. The stakes of the Occupation: "discourses" and counter-discourses of a fluid power
2. Exploring the "discourses" of the civil war state
3. Narratives from the perspective of the post-civil war state
4. Aspects from the narratives of the defeated of the Civil War
5. Deconstructing the narratives of the 1940s: postmodern historiography and its limits