The Fiction of Narrative

Hayden White is celebrated as one of the great minds in the humanities. 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, deftly introduced by Robert Doran, gathers in one place White's important -- and often hard—to—find -- essays exploring his revolutionary theories of historical writing and narrative. These texts find White at his most essayistic, engaging a wide range of topics and thinkers with characteristic insight and elegance.

The Fiction of Narrative traces 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.

"This quite extraordinary volume covers fifty years of thoughtful and provocative analysis by the world's most formidable scholar of historical practice. These essays offer up Hayden White as a superb stylist, capacious, earnest, iconoclastic, dedicated to lucid pedagogy, time and again showing how history and literature are inextricably related and bringing into the open the rhetorical underpinnings of narrative and nonnarrative history. Reflecting key moments in the intellectual development of a thinker whose insights have now become indelible features of the intellectual landscape, this volume confirms White's reputation as the ironic Vico for our times: trenchant, surprising, brilliant, indefatigable." -- Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley

"Hayden White's theoretical prominence in the areas of historiography, tropology, and narratology is well known and deservedly influential. We know him less well as a lively and astute analyst of specific texts. This collection -- which ranges from historians to philosophers, from literary history to cultural analysis -- is a splendid resource and a pleasure to read." -- Fredric Jameson, Duke University