Historical present


In linguistics and rhetoric, the historical present or historic present, also called dramatic present or narrative present, is the employment of the present tense instead of past tenses when narrating past events. It is also often called the "literary present tense". It is typically thought to heighten the dramatic force of the narrative by describing events as if they were still unfolding, and/or by foregrounding some events relative to others.

Uses in English

In English, it is used in:
  • historical chronicles,
  • fiction,
  • news headlines, and
  • everyday conversation, when recounting events as dramatized stories. In casual conversation, it is particularly common with quotative verbs such as say and go, and especially the newer quotative like.

    Examples

In an excerpt from Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, the shift from the past tense to the historical present gives a sense of immediacy, as of a recurring vision:
Standard past tense: William the Conqueror traveled to England with his army of Normans and defeated King Harold at Hastings.
Historical present: In 1066, William the Conqueror travels to England with his army of Normans and defeats King Harold at Hastings.
Novels that are written entirely in the historical present include notably John Updike's Rabbit, Run, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

In describing fiction

Summaries of the narratives of works of fiction are conventionally presented using the present tense, rather than the past tense. At any particular point of the story, as it unfolds, there is a now and so a past and a future, so whether some event mentioned in the story is past, present, or future, changes as the story progresses. The entire plot description is presented as if the story's now were a continuous present. Thus, in summarizing the plot of A Tale of Two Cities, one may write:

In other languages

The historical present is widely used in writing about history in Latin and some modern European languages.
In French, the historical present is often used in journalism and in historical texts to report events in the past.
The extinct language Shasta appeared to allow the historical present in narratives.
The New Testament, written in Koine Greek in the 1st century AD, is notable for use of the historical present, particularly in the Gospel of Mark.