SOURCE: A review of The Content of the Form, in American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 4, October, 1988, pp. 1007–08.

In the following review, LaCapra offers a positive assessment of The Content of the Form.

The present book might be considered the third part of a trilogy whose two earlier installments were Metahistory (1973) and Tropics of Discourse (1978). Metahistory took the form of a systematic treatise that laid down the principles for Hayden White's poetics of historiography. Tropics of Discourse was a collection of essays that played significant variations on those thematic principles. The Content of the Form is another collection of essays in which still further and at times more significant variations are in evidence.

The essay may be the best form with which to investigate the complex, controverted methodological and theoretical bases of historiography. In any case White is clearly a master of this form. In the present collection he...