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.

edited, with an introduction, by Robert Doran

Collingwood and Toynbee: transitions in English historical thought -- Religion, culture, and western civilization in Christopher Dawson's idea of history -- The abiding relevance of Croce's idea of history -- Romanticism, historicism, and realism: toward a period concept for early nineteenth-century intellectual history -- The tasks of intellectual history -- The culture of criticism: Gombrich, Auerbach, Popper -- The structure of historical narrative -- What is a historical system? -- The politics of contemporary philosophy of history -- The problem of change in literary history -- The problem of style in realistic representation: Marx and Flaubert -- The discourse of history -- Vico and structuralist/poststructuralist thought -- The interpretation of texts -- Historical pluralism and pan-textualism -- 'The nineteenth century' as chronotope -- Ideology and counter-ideology in Northrop Frye's anatomy of criticism -- Writing in the middle voice -- Northrop Frye's place in contemporary cultural studies -- Storytelling: historical and ideological -- The suppression of rhetoric in the nineteenth century -- Postmodernism and textual anxieties -- Guilty of history? the longue durée of Paul Ricoeur.