Hayden White is celebrated as one of the great minds in the humanities. Though perhaps best known for his tropological theory of discourse, White's theory of historical writing as narrativization is no less influential. 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 brings together twenty-three of White's previously uncollected essays written over a fifty-year period. These texts find White at his most essayistic, engaging a wide range of topics and thinkers with characteristic insight and elegance. Throughout his long career, from his earlier work on intellectual history and the philosophy of history to later essays dealing with poststructuralism and postmodernism, White has sought to reveal the essential relationship between history and theory. The Fiction of Narrative gathers in one place White's important -- and often hard-to-find -- essays exploring his revolutionary theories of historical writing and narrative. These works, deftly introduced by Robert Doran, trace the arc and evolution of White's field-defining thought and will become standard reading for students and scholars of historiography, the theory of history, and literary studies.Praise for Hayden White'No other historian appears to be at the frontier of so many developments or so skillful at integrating them into traditional American scholarship in the history of ideas.' -- Journal of Modern History'White is a master of critical and provocative thought.' -- H-Net Reviews'White has arguably changed the course of historiography in the past twenty years... Any serious historian will need to engage the issues and answers that White raises.' -- Religious Studies Review'White lays out his arguments with a clarity and rigor that few can match.' -- Choice
Editor's Note Preface Editor's Introduction Acknowledgments 1. Collingwood and Toynbee: Transitions in English Historical Thought 2. Religion, Culture, and Western Civilization in Christopher Dawson's Idea of History 3. The Abiding Relevance of Croce's Idea of History 4. Romanticism, Historicism, and Realism: Toward a Period Concept for Early Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History 5. The Tasks of Intellectual History 6. The Culture of Criticism: Gombrich, Auerbach, Popper 7. The Structure of Historical Narrative 8. What Is a Historical System? 9. The Politics of Contemporary Philosophy of History 10. The Problem of Change in Literary History 11. The Problem of Style in Realistic Representation: Marx and Flaubert 12. The Discourse of History 13. Vico and Structuralist/Poststructuralist Thought 14. The Interpretation of Texts 15. Historical Pluralism and Pantextualism 16. The ""Nineteenth Century"" as Chronotope 17. Ideology and Counterideology in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism 18. Writing in the Middle Voice 19. Northrop Frye's Place in Contemporary Cultural Studies 20. Storytelling: Historical and Ideological 21. The Suppression of Rhetoric in the Nineteenth Century 22. Postmodernism and Textual Anxieties 23. Guilty of History? The longue durée of Paul Ricoeur Notes Index
""The benefit of The Fiction of Narrative is that it enables us to see in one place White's development from a more traditional historian to the significant cultural critic he has become and to appreciate the range of his intellectual interests.""
