Tropics of Discourse

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.

Like most of White's work, the book arises from a boldly imaginative transaction between the philosophy of history, literary criticism and semiotics. Notes and Queries 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. In this White seems a successor to A. O. Lovejoy and Ernst Cassirer. Journal of Modern History

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Tropology, Discourse, and the Modes of Human ConsciousnessChapter 1. The Burden of HistoryChapter 2. Interpretation in HistoryChapter 3. The Historical Text as Literary ArtifactChapter 4. Historicism, History, and the Figurative ImaginationChapter 5. The Fictions of Factual RepresentationChapter 6. The Irrational and the Problem of Historical Knowledge in the Enlightenment Chapter 7. The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an IdeaChapter 8. The Noble Savage Theme as FetishChapter 9. The Tropics of History: The Deep Structure of the New ScienceChapter 10. What is Living and What is Dead in Croce's Criticism of VicoChapter 11. Foucault Decoded: Notes from UndergroundChapter 12. The Absurdist Moment in Contemporary Literary TheoryIndex