Hayden V. White Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on Hayden V. White

The first volume of the historical journal CLIO, published in 1972, included Hayden V. White's important essay "The Structure of Historical Narrative," later reprinted in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978) as "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact." The essay was a coup for CLIO, for it has proved to be one of the seminal texts in the modern version of the long-running debate over whether historians recover the story of the past or impose on it a story of their own. A quick sweep through the internet discloses the vitality of White's essay three decades later in its inclusion on many reading lists drawn up for college courses. White's main concern is clear in this assertion: "But in general there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences." A year later in 1973 White published his magnum opus, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, developing his thesis on "verbal fictions" in great formal detail and with impressive learning.

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