Hayden White

Hayden White was an American historian and theorist of history who taught at Wayne State, Rochester, UCLA, the University of California at Santa Cruz and Stanford. In Metahistory he argued that historical writing is a narrative construction: historians shape the past through literary modes of emplotment, argument and ideology, rooted in tropes such as metaphor and irony. He denied that this makes history fiction, but his work located much of history's meaning in the account rather than in the past itself.

Key ideas

• Historical works are verbal structures in the form of narrative prose, shaped by literary choices.
• Historians emplot events as romance, tragedy, comedy or satire, and these choices carry meaning.
• Deep tropes, such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony, prefigure how a historian sees the field.
• Narrative form is not neutral: it imposes coherence that events themselves do not possess.

Major works

• Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973)
• Tropics of Discourse (1978)
• The Content of the Form (1987)

In the conversation

• Question What does “the right side of history” actually assume about history? Sam Ellery · 5 replies
• Debate Hayden White was right: the historian chooses the plot before the facts mean anything Parisa Moghaddam · 6 replies
• Question Do civilisations really rise and fall in cycles, or do we just like the shape? Zainab Kadhim · 6 replies