Description
Book SynopsisThe 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.
Trade ReviewThe publication of The Content of the Form... is an important event. It shows that for a long period White has been unremittingly concerned with a revaluation of the concept of narrative in the contemporary context, and that the various different intellectual stimuli which he has received have all helped to focus his intense study of the subject. London Review of Books This oeuvre will continue to force us to pay close, careful, rigorous attention to the syntheses he offers, so that anyone who 'reads'-whether fiction, history, biography, autobiography, whatever-needs to have examined the writings of Hayden White. Style [White] has clearly made significant advances in laying a foundation for a better understanding of the intricate interaction between narrative representation and what it purports to represent in both history and literature. American Historical Review [White] has clearly made significant advances in laying a foundation for a better understanding of the intricate interaction between narrative representation and what it purports to represent in both history and literature. American Historical Review
Table of ContentsPreface
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
