The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

Hayden V. White

ISBN 10: 0801841151 / ISBN 13: 9780801841156

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990

About this Item

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Seller Inventory # B9780801841156

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication Date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801841151
• ISBN 13: 9780801841156
• Binding: Paperback / softback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 419 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Hayden White probes the notion of authority in art and literature and examines the problems of meaning―its production, distribution, and consumption―in different historical epochs. In the end, he suggests, the only meaning that history can have is the kind that a narrative imagination gives to it. The secret of the process by which consciousness invests history with meaning resides in "the content of the form," in the way our narrative capacities transform the present into a fulfillment of a past from which we would wish to have descended.

About the Author

Hayden White is professor emeritus of the histories of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of a number of books published by Johns Hopkins, including 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.