Hardback
June 1, 2010
9780801894794
English
424
178359
9.00 Inches (US)
6.00 Inches (US)
1.24 Inches (US)
1.6 Pounds (US)
$67.00 USD, £49.50 GBP, £55.50 GBP
v2.1 Reference
Paperback / softback
June 1, 2010
9780801894800
English
424
178359
9.00 Inches (US)
6.00 Inches (US)
0.99 Inches (US)
1.3 Pounds (US)
$35.00 USD, £26.00 GBP, £29.00 GBP
v2.1 Reference

The Fiction of Narrative

Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007

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.

About the Authors

Hayden White is a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University and a professor emeritus of the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His books include Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, and Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, all published by Johns Hopkins. Robert Doran is an assistant professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Rochester and editor of a collection of essays by René Girard, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953–2005.

Reviews

"The book will interest scholars from an array of disciplines."

"White's own three-page preface to this collection is worth the price of admission alone... The essays themselves are a treasure trove... Suffice it to say that for scholars wondering why White's reputation is so formidable they could hardly do better than to start with this collection."

- David Watson - Literature and History

"The benefit of The Fiction of Narrative is that it enables us to see in one place White's development from a more traditional historian to the significant cultural critic he has become and to appreciate the range of his intellectual interests."

- Jo Alyson Parker - KronoScope : Journal for the Study of Time

Endorsements

"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
Johns Hopkins University Press
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9780801894794 : the-fiction-of-narrative-white-doran
Hardback
424 Pages
$67.00 USD
9780801894800 : the-fiction-of-narrative-white-doran
Paperback / softback
424 Pages
$35.00 USD

Other Titles by Hayden White

Figural Realism

Hayden White
Mar 2020 - Johns Hopkins University Press
$32.00 USD - Paperback / softback
$32.00 USD - Electronic book text

Metahistory, Fortieth Anniversary Edition

Hayden White - with a new preface - foreword by Michael S. Roth
Dec 2014 - Johns Hopkins University Press
$32.00 USD - Paperback / softback
$32.00 USD - Electronic book text

Times of History

Aziz Al-Azmeh, foreword by Hayden White
Oct 2007 - Central European University Press
$90.00 USD - Hardback

Other Titles in LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory

Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature

Paul Douglass
Mar 2025 - University Press of Kentucky
$30.00 USD - Paperback / softback
$12.95 USD - Electronic book text

The Sound of Writing

edited by Christopher Cannon and Steven Justice
Nov 2023 - Johns Hopkins University Press
$114.95 USD - Hardback
$54.95 USD - Paperback / softback

How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now

Walter Stephens
Oct 2023 - Johns Hopkins University Press
$35.95 USD - Hardback

Other Titles in Literary theory

Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature

Paul Douglass
Mar 2025 - University Press of Kentucky
$30.00 USD - Paperback / softback
$12.95 USD - Electronic book text

The Sound of Writing

edited by Christopher Cannon and Steven Justice
Nov 2023 - Johns Hopkins University Press
$114.95 USD - Hardback
$54.95 USD - Paperback / softback

Allegorical Moments

Lyn Hejinian
Nov 2023 - Wesleyan University Press
$95.00 USD - Hardback
$26.95 USD - Paperback / softback