Hayden White probes the notion of authority in art and literature and examines the problems of meaning--its production, distribution, and consumption--in different historical epochs. In the end, he suggests, the only meaning that history can have is the kind that a narrative imagination gives to it. The secret of the process by which consciousness invests history with meaning resides in -the content of the form, - in the way our narrative capacities transform the present into a fulfillment of a past from which we would wish to have descended.

Hayden White is celebrated as one of the great minds in the humanities. Since the publication of his groundbreaking monograph, Metahistory, in 1973, White's work has been crucial to disciplines where narrative is of primary concern, including history, literary studies, anthropology, philosophy, art history, and film and media studies.

This volume, deftly introduced by Robert Doran, gathers in one place White's important--and often hard-to-find--essays exploring his revolutionary theories of historical writing and narrative. These texts find White at his most essayistic,...

Since its initial publication in 1973, Hayden White's Metahistory has remained an essential book for understanding the nature of historical writing. In this classic work, White argues that a deep structural content lies beyond the surface level of historical texts. This latent poetic and linguistic content--which White dubs the -metahistorical element---essentially serves as a paradigm for what an -appropriate- historical explanation should be.

To support his thesis, White analyzes the complex writing styles of historians like Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt, and...