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.
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality
Chapter 2. The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory
Chapter 3. The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation
Chapter 4. Droysen's Historik: Historical Writing as a Bourgeois Science
Chapter 5. Foucault's Discourse: The Historiography of Anti-Humanism
Chapter 6. Getting Out of History: Jameson's Redemption of Narrative
Chapter 7. The Metaphysics of Narrativity: Time and Symbol in Ricoeur's Philosophy of History
Chapter 8. The Context in the Text: Method and Ideology in Intellectual History
Notes
Index
