 There is a yearning that resembles the yearning for mystical knowledge at the core of the search for the historical sublime, and thus the concept ties contemporary historical fiction to a literary history (that of the historical novel), a type of historiography (postmodern, post-"Annales" historiography), and a spiritual questing.Elias argues that the postmodern imagination confronts the historical sublime rather than represses it; confronts it as repetition and deferral; seeks sublime History but simultaneously has lost faith in the storytelling needed to do so; and consequently has ties to, but reverses the dominant of, the traditional Anglo-American historical novel.The term "metahistorical romance" also builds upon work by Linda Hutcheon, whose term "historiographic metafiction" described the ironic stance of contemporary historical fiction.