The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957-2007
The book will interest scholars from an array of disciplines.(Choice)This quite extraordinary volume covers fifty years of thoughtful and provocative analysis by the world’s most formidable scholar of historical practice. These essays offer up Hayden White as a superb stylist, capacious, earnest, iconoclastic, dedicated to lucid pedagogy, time and again showing how history and literature are inextricably related and bringing into the open the rhetorical underpinnings of narrative and nonnarrative history. Reflecting key moments in the intellectual development of a thinker whose insights have now become indelible features of the intellectual landscape, this volume confirms White’s reputation as the ironic Vico for our times: trenchant, surprising, brilliant, indefatigable.(Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley)Hayden White’s theoretical prominence in the areas of historiography, tropology, and narratology is well known and deservedly influential. We know him less well as a lively and astute analyst of specific texts. This collection—which ranges from historians to philosophers, from literary history to cultural analysis—is a splendid resource and a pleasure to read.(Fredric Jameson, Duke University)White's own three-page preface to this collection is worth the price of admission alone... The essays themselves are a treasure trove... Suffice it to say that for scholars wondering why White's reputation is so formidable they could hardly do better than to start with this collection.(David WatsonLiterature and History)The benefit ofThe Fiction of Narrativeis that it enables us to see in one place White's development from a more traditional historian to the significant cultural critic he has become and to appreciate the range of his intellectual interests.(Jo Alyson ParkerKronoScope : Journal for the Study of Time)