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Cover image of The Fiction of Narrative
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The Fiction of Narrative

Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007

Hayden White
edited and with an introduction by Robert Doran

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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, engaging a wide range of...

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, engaging a wide range of topics and thinkers with characteristic insight and elegance.

The Fiction of Narrative traces 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.

Reviews

Reviews

The book will interest scholars from an array of disciplines.

White's own three-page preface to this collection is worth the price of admission alone... The essays themselves are a treasure trove... Suffice it to say that for scholars wondering why White's reputation is so formidable they could hardly do better than to start with this collection.

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.

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."—

White is a master of critical and provocative thought.

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Book Details

Table of Contents

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

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

Author Bios
Featured Contributor

Hayden White

Hayden White is professor emeritus of the histories of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of a number of books published by Johns Hopkins, including Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, and Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect.
Featured Contributor

Robert Doran

Robert Doran is an assistant professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Rochester and editor of a collection of essays by René Girard, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953–2005.