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Figural Realism

Studies in the Mimesis Effect

Hayden White

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Originally published in 1998. In his earlier books such as Tropics of Discourse and The Content of the Form, Hayden White focused on the conventions of historical writing and on the ordering of historical consciousness. In Figural Realism, White collects eight interrelated essays primarily concerned with the treatment of history in recent literary critical discourse. "'History' is not only an object we can study," writes White, "it is also and even primarily a certain kind of relationship to 'the past' mediated by a distinctive kind of written discourse. It is because historical discourse is...

Originally published in 1998. In his earlier books such as Tropics of Discourse and The Content of the Form, Hayden White focused on the conventions of historical writing and on the ordering of historical consciousness. In Figural Realism, White collects eight interrelated essays primarily concerned with the treatment of history in recent literary critical discourse. "'History' is not only an object we can study," writes White, "it is also and even primarily a certain kind of relationship to 'the past' mediated by a distinctive kind of written discourse. It is because historical discourse is actualized in its culturally significant form as a specific kind of writing that we may consider the relevance of literary theory to both the theory and the practice of historiography."

Reviews

Reviews

[White] is a master of critical and provocative thought... Figural Realism... deserves to be read by historians in search of rejuvenating a sense of theoretical enlightenment.

A collection of essays by one who has arguably changed the course of historiography in the past twenty years... Any serious historian will need to engage the issues and answers that White raises.

[A] fascinating meditation on modernism or, more accurately, the effects of modernism... In this book, White confirms that he remains an active and important thinker.

White lays out his arguments with a clarity and rigor that few can match.

Hayden White... is the most prominent American scholar to unite historiography and literary criticism into a broader reflection on narrative and cultural understanding.

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Table of Contents

Preface
Ackowledgments
Chapter 1. Literary Theory and Historical Writing
Chapter 2. Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth in Historical Representations
Chapter 3. Formalist and Contextualist

Preface
Ackowledgments
Chapter 1. Literary Theory and Historical Writing
Chapter 2. Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth in Historical Representations
Chapter 3. Formalist and Contextualist Strategies in Historical Explanation
Chapter 4. The Modernist Event
Chapter 5. Auerbach's Literary History: Figural Causation and Modernist Historicism
Chapter 6. Freud's Tropology of Dreaming
Chapter 7. Narrative, Description, and Tropology in Proust
Chapter 8. Form, Reference, and Ideology in Musical Discourse
Notes
Index

Author Bio
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Hayden White

Hayden White is professor emeritus of the histories of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of a number of books published by Johns Hopkins, including 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.