The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957-2007

by Hayden White, Robert Doran (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801894800
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	06/01/2010
Pages:	424
Sales rank:	323,344
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.

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.

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 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

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

This quite extraordinary volume covers fifty years of thoughtful and provocative analysis by the world’s most formidable scholar of historical practice. These essays offer up Hayden White as a superb stylist, capacious, earnest, iconoclastic, dedicated to lucid pedagogy, time and again showing how history and literature are inextricably related and bringing into the open the rhetorical underpinnings of narrative and nonnarrative history. Reflecting key moments in the intellectual development of a thinker whose insights have now become indelible features of the intellectual landscape, this volume confirms White’s reputation as the ironic Vico for our times: trenchant, surprising, brilliant, indefatigable.
—Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley

Hayden White’s theoretical prominence in the areas of historiography, tropology, and narratology is well known and deservedly influential. We know him less well as a lively and astute analyst of specific texts. This collection—which ranges from historians to philosophers, from literary history to cultural analysis—is a splendid resource and a pleasure to read.
—Fredric Jameson, Duke University

Judith Butler

This quite extraordinary volume covers fifty years of thoughtful and provocative analysis by the world’s most formidable scholar of historical practice. These essays offer up Hayden White as a superb stylist, capacious, earnest, iconoclastic, dedicated to lucid pedagogy, time and again showing how history and literature are inextricably related and bringing into the open the rhetorical underpinnings of narrative and nonnarrative history. Reflecting key moments in the intellectual development of a thinker whose insights have now become indelible features of the intellectual landscape, this volume confirms White’s reputation as the ironic Vico for our times: trenchant, surprising, brilliant, indefatigable.

Fredric Jameson

Hayden White’s theoretical prominence in the areas of historiography, tropology, and narratology is well known and deservedly influential. We know him less well as a lively and astute analyst of specific texts. This collection—which ranges from historians to philosophers, from literary history to cultural analysis—is a splendid resource and a pleasure to read.

Editorial Reviews

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.

KronoScope : Journal for the Study of Time - Jo Alyson Parker

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 is a master of critical and provocative thought.

H-Net Reviews

"White lays out his arguments with a clarity and rigor that few can match."

Choice

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.

— David Watson

Literature and History

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.

Literature and History - David Watson

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

The book will interest scholars from an array of disciplines.
—Choice

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.
—David Watson, Literature and History

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.
—Jo Alyson Parker, KronoScope : Journal for the Study of Time

From the Publisher