Meta-History: Nineteenth-Century European Historical Imagination

Author: (USA) White/H.
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-03-01
Features: The Metahistory is bound to stir debate in the field of historiography and become a classic in the discipline. No renowned historian should overlook this book. — The Historian Ambitious and challenging, it attempts to demonstrate that all historical thought, whether from practicing historians or philosophical historians, relies on a "deep structure of historical imagination." — Pacific Historical Review This is the seminal work of Hayden White, hailed as the most important historical philosophy book of the second half of the 20th century, and a landmark in the linguistic turn of 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, accepted uncritically as a paradigm. The author employs formalist methods to construct a structuralist text analysis theory while emphasizing the principles of historicism. Using ironic metaphorical strategies, he analyzes eight representative 19th-century historiographical thinkers, revealing the dominant metaphorical modes they employed in their historical writing and the accompanying linguistic rules, thereby confirming the poetic essence universally present in historical works.