Tropics of Discourse develops White's ideas on interpretation in history, on the relationship between history and the novel, and on history and historicism. Vico, Croce, Derrida, and Foucault are among the figures he assesses in this work, which also offers original interpretations of a number of literary themes, including the Wild Man and the Noble Savage. White's commentary ranges from a reappraisal of Enlightenment history to a reflective summary of the current state of literary criticism.
Hayden White Books
July 12, 1928 – March 5, 2018
Hayden White, a historian operating within the tradition of literary criticism, is renowned for his seminal work on historical imagination. He meticulously analyzed the narratives of 19th and 20th-century historians and philosophers, proposing that historical discourse is a form of fiction classifiable by its structure and linguistic use. White challenged the notion of objective historical accounts, arguing that historians employ unarticulated assumptions in selecting and interpreting events. His work fundamentally altered the theory of history by applying rhetorical tropes to narrative discourse, revealing deeper insights into authorial attitudes and historical contexts.
Metahistory
The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
In White's view, beyond the surface level of the historical text, there is a deep structural, or latent, content that is generally poetic and specifically linguistic in nature. This deeper content - the metahistorical element - indicates what an appropriate historical explanation should be.
The Content of the Form
Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation
- 264 pages
- 10 hours of reading
"[White] has clearly made significant advances in laying a foundation for a better understanding of the intricate interaction between narrative representation and what it purports to represent in both history and literature."--American Historical Review.
The Ethics of Narrative
- 306 pages
- 11 hours of reading
The second volume of The Ethics of Narrative completes the project of bringing together nearly all of Hayden White's uncollected essays from the last two decades of his life, including articles, essays, and previously unpublished lectures. As in the first volume, volume two features White's trenchant articulations of his influential theories, as well as his explorations of a wide range of ideas and authors at the frontiers of critical theory, literature, and historical studies. These include the concept of utopia in history, modernism and postmodernism, constructivism, the conceptualization of historical periods such as "the Sixties" and "the Enlightenment," the representation of the Holocaust in scholarly and literary writing, as well as essays on Frank Kermode, Saul Friedländer, and Krzysztof Pomian.