Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe

By Hayden White

Book Overview

This penetrating analysis of eight classic nineteenth-century thinkers explains how historians use literary techniques to write sophisticated historical works.

Since its initial publication in 1973, Hayden White's Metahistory has remained an essential book for understanding the nature of historical writing. In this classic work, White argues that a deep structural content lies beyond the surface level of historical texts. This latent poetic and linguistic content--which White dubs the "metahistorical element"--essentially serves as a paradigm for what an "appropriate" historical explanation should be.

To support his thesis, White analyzes the complex writing styles of historians like Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt, and philosophers of history such as Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Croce. The first work in the history of historiography to concentrate on historical writing as writing, Metahistory sets out to deprive history of its status as a bedrock of factual truth, to redeem narrative as the substance of historicality, and to identify the extent to which any distinction between history and ideology on the basis of the presumed scientificity of the former is spurious.

This fortieth-anniversary edition includes a new preface in which White explains his motivation for writing Metahistory and discusses how reactions to the book informed his later writing. In a new foreword, Michael S. Roth, a former student of White's and the current president of Wesleyan University, reflects on the significance of the book across a broad range of fields, including history, literary theory, and philosophy. This book will be of interest to anyone--in any discipline--who takes the past as a serious object of study.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1421415607
• ISBN13: 9781421415604
• Release Date: December 2014
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.9" x 8.9"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

Metahistory

Depending on your familiarity with the study of history this book may be either over- or under-rated. It is fantastic text and highly informative. That said, a few cautionary notes: This book has diminishing returns. I read the whole thing, but the book is rather formulaic. Spend more time on the Introduction than anything else. Without it you'll be lost. Also I have little familiarity with the authors White discusses. With the ones I did know, Nietszche, Hegel, and Tocqueville, I found his commentary very interesting. But some familiarity with each author addressed would be worthwhile to enjoy it fully. Hope it was useful. Whether or not you buy his argument, the work is definitely a modern classic.

Highly sophisticated

Hayden White's METAHISTORY is a sophisticated analysis of historical methodology in the nineteenth century. Without a doubt, the book is brilliant. White analyzes the poetic and linguistic structure behind the writings of historians and philosophers of history. He focuses on the works of Michelet, Ranke, Toqueville, Burckhardt, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce. The result is a compelling look at how the methodological structure of historical writing changed through the course of the nineteenth century.However, there is a major drawback to the work. White frequently uses a number of poetic and linguistic terms that are not standard fare for the average reader. For example, unfamiliar terms such as Metonymy, Synecdoche, Metaphor, Organicist, and Contextualist are used to describe the methodology behind various historical works. I frequently found myself lost and flipping back pages to find the definition of a particular term. This was an un-needed difficulty; the terms only served to obscure White's otherwise clear and logical arguments.In conclusion, this highly sophisticated work is a brilliant piece of historical analysis. However, it would have been much more readable without the difficult language.

A must for any historian

Hayden White's Metahistory takes the reader deeply into the winding roads of history writing. From Hegel to Croce, he reviews and analizes the many different ways history was written in the nineteenth century and it's impact and influence in today's historiography. A must for any historian, but a little too deep - and perhaps boring- for those not familiar with history's theory and philosophy.