Content of the Form

Hayden White is professor of the history of consciousness and Presidential Professor of Historical Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is the author of Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, both available from Johns Hopkins University Press.

The publication of The Content of the Form... is an important event. It shows that for a long period White has been unremittingly concerned with a revaluation of the concept of narrative in the contemporary context, and that the various different intellectual stimuli which he has received have all helped to focus his intense study of the subject. London Review of Books This oeuvre will continue to force us to pay close, careful, rigorous attention to the syntheses he offers, so that anyone who 'reads'-whether fiction, history, biography, autobiography, whatever-needs to have examined the writings of Hayden White. Style [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 [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

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsChapter 1. The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of RealityChapter 2. The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical TheoryChapter 3. The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-SublimationChapter 4. Droysen's Historik: Historical Writing as a Bourgeois ScienceChapter 5. Foucault's Discourse: The Historiography of Anti-HumanismChapter 6. Getting Out of History: Jameson's Redemption of NarrativeChapter 7. The Metaphysics of Narrativity: Time and Symbol in Ricoeur's Philosophy of HistoryChapter 8. The Context in the Text: Method and Ideology in Intellectual HistoryNotesIndex