The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

Hayden White probes the notion of authority in art and literature and examines the problems of meaning―its production, distribution, and consumption―in different historical epochs. In the end, he suggests, the only meaning that history can have is the kind that a narrative imagination gives to it. The secret of the process by which consciousness invests history with meaning resides in "the content of the form," in the way our narrative capacities transform the present into a fulfillment of a past from which we would wish to have descended.

• Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
• The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957-2007
• Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism
• Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 20th Anniversary Edition
• The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language
• Orientalism
• Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
• Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference - New Edition (Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History)
• The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
• Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies)