Prior to Barthes' essay, few practicing historians had written about the literary character of historical writing. By placing the status of history as a literary genre or narrative at the forefront of discussion, historians and critics began to acknowledge that history and historical knowledge existed in the form of written objects, as texts. The knowledge in these texts was seen to be decisively shaped by the author, but even more so by the cultural context or discursive system in which the author worked. Hayden White's Metahistory (1973; discussed below) made a more detailed analysis along much the same lines as Barthes, and his work came to represent what more empirically minded historians saw as a misguided fascination with the form, rather than the content, of history. Barthes and White were themselves reluctant to discuss the subjectivity of historians, but in formal ways they laid the groundwork for a consideration of historians as authors.19