The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007 - Softcover

White, Hayden

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801894808 ISBN 13: 9780801894800

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Hayden White is celebrated as one of the great minds in the humanities. Since the publication of his groundbreaking monograph, Metahistory, in 1973, White’s work has been crucial to disciplines where narrative is of primary concern, including history, literary studies, anthropology, philosophy, art history, and film and media studies.

This volume, deftly introduced by Robert Doran, gathers in one place White’s important—and often hard-to-find—essays exploring his revolutionary theories of historical writing and narrative. These texts find White at his most essayistic, engaging a wide range of topics and thinkers with characteristic insight and elegance.

The Fiction of Narrative traces the arc and evolution of White’s field-defining thought and will become standard reading for students and scholars of historiography, the theory of history, and literary studies.

About this title

About the Author

Hayden White is a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University and a professor emeritus of the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His books include Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, and Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, all published by Johns Hopkins. Robert Doran is an assistant professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Rochester and editor of a collection of essays by René Girard, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953–2005.

Review

"The book will interest scholars from an array of disciplines."

(Choice)

"This quite extraordinary volume covers fifty years of thoughtful and provocative analysis by the world’s most formidable scholar of historical practice. These essays offer up Hayden White as a superb stylist, capacious, earnest, iconoclastic, dedicated to lucid pedagogy, time and again showing how history and literature are inextricably related and bringing into the open the rhetorical underpinnings of narrative and nonnarrative history. Reflecting key moments in the intellectual development of a thinker whose insights have now become indelible features of the intellectual landscape, this volume confirms White’s reputation as the ironic Vico for our times: trenchant, surprising, brilliant, indefatigable."

(Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley)

"Hayden White’s theoretical prominence in the areas of historiography, tropology, and narratology is well known and deservedly influential. We know him less well as a lively and astute analyst of specific texts. This collection―which ranges from historians to philosophers, from literary history to cultural analysis―is a splendid resource and a pleasure to read."

(Fredric Jameson, Duke University)

"White's own three-page preface to this collection is worth the price of admission alone... The essays themselves are a treasure trove... Suffice it to say that for scholars wondering why White's reputation is so formidable they could hardly do better than to start with this collection."

(David Watson Literature and History)

"The benefit of The Fiction of Narrative is that it enables us to see in one place White's development from a more traditional historian to the significant cultural critic he has become and to appreciate the range of his intellectual interests."

(Jo Alyson Parker KronoScope : Journal for the Study of Time)

Edition details

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0801894808
• ISBN 13: 9780801894800
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 424