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

Hayden White is celebrated as one of the great minds in the humanities. Though perhaps best known for his tropological theory of discourse, White's theory of historical writing as narrativization is no less influential. 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 brings together twenty-three of White's previously uncollected essays written over a fifty-year period. These texts find White at his most essayistic, engaging a wide range of topics and thinkers with characteristic insight and elegance. Throughout his long career, from his earlier work on intellectual history and the philosophy of history to later essays dealing with poststructuralism and postmodernism, White has sought to reveal the essential relationship between history and theory.

The Fiction of Narrative gathers in one place White's important -- and often hard-to-find -- essays exploring his revolutionary theories of historical writing and narrative. These works, deftly introduced by Robert Doran, trace 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.

Praise for Hayden White

"No other historian appears to be at the frontier of so many developments or so skillful at integrating them into traditional American scholarship in the history of ideas." -- Journal of Modern History

"White is a master of critical and provocative thought." -- H-Net Reviews

"White has arguably changed the course of historiography in the past twenty years... Any serious historian will need to engage the issues and answers that White raises." -- Religious Studies Review

"White lays out his arguments with a clarity and rigor that few can match." -- Choice

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 Rene Girard, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953–2005.