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.
