Meta-History: Nineteenth-Century European Historical Imagination

Author: White
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-11-01
Features: The Metahistory is bound to stir debate in the field of historiography and become a classic in the discipline. No prominent historian should ignore this book. — History
Ambitious and challenging, it attempts to demonstrate that all historical thought, whether from practicing historians or philosophers of history, relies on a "deep structure of historical imagination." — Pacific Historical Review
This is Hayden White's breakthrough work, hailed as the most important historical philosophy book of the second half of the 20th century and a landmark in the linguistic turn in contemporary Western historiographical studies. The author argues that there is no sharp divide between history and poetry; any historical work contains a deep structure that is poetic in nature and essentially linguistic, a paradigm accepted uncritically.
Employing formalist methods, the author constructs a structuralist text analysis theory while emphasizing the principles of historicism. Using an ironic metaphorical strategy, he analyzes eight representative 19th-century historiographical thinkers one by one, showing readers the dominant metaphorical approaches they employed in their historical writing and the accompanying linguistic rules, thereby confirming the poetic essence in historical works.