The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

Book info: The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Kindle, 264 pages) – Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Language: English.

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.