Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe Fortieth Anniversary Edition

The author examines the historical consciousness in the 19th century through the work of 19th-century European historical authors and philosophers: Hegel, Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce. He considers what it means to think historically and the unique characteristics of a historical method of inquiry, offering a new perspective on the nature and function of historical knowledge. He focuses on the structural components of their accounts and uses the poetic concepts of metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and irony as means to characterize the dominant modes of historical thinking during the period, as well as romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire as the types of stories used by historians to provide a plot structure. This edition has a new preface and foreword. Annotation ©2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Since its initial publication in 1973, Hayden White’s Metahistory has remained an essential book for understanding the nature of historical writing. In this classic work, White argues that a deep structural content lies beyond the surface level of historical texts. This latent poetic and linguistic content—which White dubs the "metahistorical element"—essentially serves as a paradigm for what an "appropriate" historical explanation should be.To support his thesis, White analyzes the complex writing styles of historians like Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt, and philosophers of history such as Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Croce. The first work in the history of historiography to concentrate on historical writing as writing, Metahistory sets out to deprive history of its status as a bedrock of factual truth, to redeem narrative as the substance of historicality, and to identify the extent to which any distinction between history and ideology on the basis of the presumed scientificity of the former is spurious.This fortieth-anniversary edition includes a new preface in which White explains his motivation for writingMetahistory and discusses how reactions to the book informed his later writing. In a new foreword, Michael S. Roth, a former student of White’s and the current president of Wesleyan University, reflects on the significance of the book across a broad range of fields, including history, literary theory, and philosophy. This book will be of interest to anyone—in any discipline—who takes the past as a serious object of study.