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.
