![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Beginning with his seminal work, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) and continuing in his collections Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978), The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987), and Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (1999), White has methodically, at times brilliantly, elaborated a position that calls into question the very concept of historical knowledge by interrogating the discursive basis of historiography, both its epistemological foundations and the deep structure of its linguistic tropes and narrative devices. Indeed, one scholar writes that we "would have to return to the nineteenth century to find a thinker who has had a greater impact on the way we think about historical representation, the discipline of history, and on how historiography intersects with other domains of inquiry" (Doran 1). Tolstoy ( 188, cited in Berlin 31) Hayden White has dedicated his career to debunking common assumptions about the nature of historiography and the role and function of historians. "History would be an excellent thing if only it were true." ![]()
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