… Or What's a Meta For?
If there is one text most closely associated with the “linguistic turn,” it is Hayden White's Metahistory. White's work has become the touchstone for all inquiries into the form and meaning of historical representation. As an American professor of modern European intellectual history, Hayden White (1928–) began to study nineteenth-century historiography and liberalism in the 1950s. He was particularly influenced by literary critic Northrop Frye, whose Anatomy of Criticism (1957) presented a new formalist analysis of narrative fiction. White also became one of the most consistently vocal advocates of Foucault. Metahistory presented a highly detailed and complicated mapping of tropes in nineteenth-century historiography in order to show how historical writing created complex narrative structures. White observed that a “metanarrative” (his own term) preceded historical research: it was an overarching and predetermined cultural field that shaped historical narratives. Historians, in selecting their sources and organizing their accounts in narrative form, had always already made choices that shaped the story they told, choices that reflected an author's poetic sensibilities. A reader's attention to the historical plot, then, could reveal how historians had worked within the metanarrative, what choices they had made and what they hoped to convey – as well as the deeper assumptions they never attempted to make explicit. White portrayed the historian as reader, and his book was a monumental exercise in reading. Many readers, overwhelmed by the formal structuralism of White's account, mistook this exercise for a prescriptive model for all historical work, and they simply rejected it. White's influence, indeed, appeared to be much greater among literary critics.27 British literary critic Peter de Bolla emphasized the importance of White's narrative theory as “[enabling] a ‘dialogue’ between the historically determined rhetoric taken as an object of study, and the rhetorically determined point of analysis from which history writing necessarily departs.”28
… Or What's a Meta For?If there is one text most closely associated with the “linguistic turn,” it is Hayden White's Metahistory. White's work has become the touchstone for all inquiries into the form and meaning of historical representation. As an American professor of modern European intellectual history, Hayden White (1928–) began to study nineteenth-century historiography and liberalism in the 1950s. He was particularly influenced by literary critic Northrop Frye, whose Anatomy of Criticism (1957) presented a new formalist analysis of narrative fiction. White also became one of the most consistently vocal advocates of Foucault. Metahistory presented a highly detailed and complicated mapping of tropes in nineteenth-century historiography in order to show how historical writing created complex narrative structures. White observed that a “metanarrative” (his own term) preceded historical research: it was an overarching and predetermined cultural field that shaped historical narratives. Historians, in selecting their sources and organizing their accounts in narrative form, had always already made choices that shaped the story they told, choices that reflected an author's poetic sensibilities. A reader's attention to the historical plot, then, could reveal how historians had worked within the metanarrative, what choices they had made and what they hoped to convey – as well as the deeper assumptions they never attempted to make explicit. White portrayed the historian as reader, and his book was a monumental exercise in reading. Many readers, overwhelmed by the formal structuralism of White's account, mistook this exercise for a prescriptive model for all historical work, and they simply rejected it. White's influence, indeed, appeared to be much greater among literary critics.27 British literary critic Peter de Bolla emphasized the importance of White's narrative theory as “[enabling] a ‘dialogue’ between the historically determined rhetoric taken as an object of study, and the rhetorically determined point of analysis from which history writing necessarily departs.”28
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