The article suggests the need for a shift in the historian's traditional outlook on literature, according to which the latter is a provider of «useful knowledge and information.» This point of view is based on the conception of the literary work—the novel, in particular— as a faithful representación of reality. Nevertheless, a critique of this mimetic ability of the novel is perceived as early as the mid-nineteenth century. The article explores how several canonical nineteenth-century authors began to question the mimetic capacity of the novel. It also discusses later developments in literary theory concomitant with Modernism's break with realism. Beginning with the Avant-garde, the novel demanded a different kind of reader, one able to perceive and interrógate those unresolved textual processes and problems that the novel itself evidences and therefore demand from the historian an opening to new forms of reading.