Hayden White

Major Publications:
• Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.
• Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.
• The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.
• Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.

Theories of Historiography
Metahistory
In his book Metahistory, White suggests that historical discourse is a form of fiction writing that can be
classified and studied on the basis of its structure and its language. To White, modern history texts are
anything but objective and accurate representations of the past. Historians and philosophers, White
believes, operate under vague assumptions in arranging, selecting, and interpreting events.
• “Historiography is an especially good ground on which to consider the nature of narration
and narrativity because it is here that our desire for the imaginary, the possible, must
contest with the imperatives of the real, the actual. If we view narration and narrativity as
the instruments with which the conflicting claims of the imaginary and the real are
mediated, arbitrated, or resolved in a discourse, we begin to comprehend both the appeal
of the narrative and the grounds for refusing it” (The Content of the Form 4).
The term “metahistory” has largely been associated with White. In general, Metahistory is the philosophy
of history, and it examines the various principles giving rise to the notion of historical progression and the
narratives that describe it. White sees metahistory as a term and as a form of writing that is similar to
metafiction and metanarrative, and that objective history is impossible.

The Problem of Historiographical Styles

In Metahistory, pages 5-38, White states that historical discourse can be classified in literary,
argumentative, ideological, and language categories:

EMPLOTMENT ARGUMENT IDEOLOGY TROPES

Romantic Formist Anarchist Metaphor
Tragic Mechanistic Radical Metonomy
Comic Organicist Conservative Synecdoche
Satirical Contextualist Liberal Irony

Emplotment: Historians combine numerous brief stories into the “completed story” and use various plot
techniques.
• Romance: Drama of the triumph of good over evil, virtue over vice, light over dark, and
of the ultimate transcendence of man over the world.
• Tragic: No festive occasions. Man is enmeshed in a struggle that ultimately results in the
resignation of men to the conditions under which they must labor in the world.
• Comic: Hope is held out for the temporary triumph of man over his world. Comic history
uses festive occasions to terminate his dramatic accounts of change and transformation.
• Satire: Man is a captive of the world rather than its master, and that the human
consciousness is inadequate in overcoming the dark force of death.

Argument: Four paradigms that account for the different notions of the nature of historical reality.
• Formist: A historian who classifies or identifies objects or events.
• Mechanistic: Believes that objects and events belong to set classes or phenomenon.

Alex Kaufman English 232r Spring 2002

 • Organicist: Reduces all objects or events to parts of a larger process.
• Contextualist: Reveals the relations of any specific event to other events of the same time
period in order to explain it.

Ideology: “The ideological dimensions of a historical account reflect the ethical element of the historian’s
assumptions of a particular position on the question of the nature of historical knowledge and the
implications that can be drawn from the study of past events for the understanding of present ones”
Metahistory 22).
• Anarchist: Belief in the necessity of structural transformations by abolishing society and
substituting it with a community.
• Radical: Reconstituting society on new bases.
• Conservative: Sees historical evolution as a progressive elaboration on the institutional
structure that currently prevails.
• Liberal: Seeing a Utopian society in the distant future and trying to realize it.

Tropes: The use of the poetic language by historians to imagine and construct a particular history.

EMPLOTMENT ARGUMENT IDEOLOGY TROPES

Romantic Formist Anarchist Metaphor
Tragic Mechanistic Radical Metonomy
Comic Organicist Conservative Synecdoche
Satirical Contextualist Liberal Irony

Questions to consider:
1. What particular mode(s) of emplotment do historians use in a given text, and how do they have an
impact of the story and of the written history?
2. Ideological implications can be seen throughout a given text. What particular ideology does a
historian use, and how does this lead to the notion of history as biased fiction?
3. How will White’s theories of historiography impact and influence the ways in which you examine
a “historical document?”
4. Outlaw narratives are many times textually and historically problematic. How can White’s
theories of metahistory delineate and clarify issues of power, of representation, of the art/act of
writing? How can those same theories further problematize those very same concepts?
5. What limits do you see regarding White’s theories?

Alex Kaufman English 232r Spring 2002