Metahistory: Nineteenth-Century European Historical Imagination

Author: (USA) 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 this domain. 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 philosophers of history, relies on the "deep structure of historical imagination." — The 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 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, 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 one by one, showing readers the dominant metaphorical approaches they adopted in their historical writing and the accompanying linguistic rules, thereby confirming the poetic essence universally present in historical works.