Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe is a historiography

Historiography

Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...

 book by Hayden White

Hayden White

Hayden White is a historian in the tradition of literary criticism, perhaps most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe...

 first published in 1973.

On the second page of his Introduction Hayden White stated:

The theoretical framework is outlined in the first 50 pages of the book which considers in detail eight major figures of 19th-century history and philosophy of history. The larger context of historiography and writing in general is also considered. White's approach uses systematically a fourfold structural schema

Conceptual model

In the most general sense, a model is anything used in any way to represent anything else. Some models are physical objects, for instance, a toy model which may be assembled, and may even be made to work like the object it represents. They are used to help us know and understand the subject matter...

 with two terms mediating between a pair of opposites.

Synopsis

According to White the historian begins his work by constituting a chronicle of events which is to be organized into a coherent story. These are the two preliminary steps before processing the material into a plot which is argumented as to express an ideology. Thus the historical work is "a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them".

For the typologies of emplotment, argumentation and ideologies White refers to works by Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye

Herman Northrop Frye, was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century....

, Stephen Pepper

Stephen Pepper

Stephen C. Pepper was an American philosopher.-References:*http://people.sunyit.edu/~harrell/Pepper/Index.htm*http://people.sunyit.edu/~harrell/Pepper/pep_efron.htm-External Links:...

 and Karl Mannheim

Karl Mannheim

Karl Mannheim , or Károly Mannheim in the original writing of his name, was a Jewish Hungarian-born sociologist, influential in the first half of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of classical sociology and a founder of the sociology of knowledge.-Life:Mannheim studied in Budapest,...

 . His four basic emplotments are provided by the archetypical genres of romance

Romance (genre)

As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant portrayed as...

, comedy

Comedy

Comedy , as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse or work generally intended to amuse by creating laughter, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in...

, tragedy

Tragedy

Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of...

 and satire

Satire

Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...

. The modes of argumentation, following Pepper's 'adequate root metaphors' are formist, organist, mechanicist and contextualist. Among the main types of Ideology White adopts anarchy

Anarchy

Anarchy , has more than one colloquial definition. In the United States, the term "anarchy" typically is meant to refer to a society which lacks publicly recognized government or violently enforced political authority...

, conservatism

Conservatism

Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism...

, radicalism

Political radicalism

The term political radicalism denotes political principles focused on altering social structures through revolutionary means and changing value systems in fundamental ways...

 and liberalism

Liberalism

Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...

. White affirms that elective affinities

Elective Affinities

Elective Affinities , also translated under the title Kindred by Choice, is the third novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in 1809. The title is taken from a scientific term once used to describe the tendency of chemical species to combine with certain substances or species in preference...

 link the three different aspects of a work and only four combinations (out of 64) are without internal inconsistencies or 'tensions'. The limitation arises through a general
mode of functioning - representation, reduction, integration or
negation, which White assimilates to one of the four main tropes:
metaphor

Metaphor

A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...

, metonymy

Metonymy

Metonymy is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept...

 synecdoche

Synecdoche

Synecdoche , meaning "simultaneous understanding") is a figure of speech in which a term is used in one of the following ways:* Part of something is used to refer to the whole thing , or...

 and irony

Irony

Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...

. Strucuturalist
as Roman Jakobson

Roman Jakobson

Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...

 or Emile Benveniste

Émile Benveniste

Émile Benveniste was a French Jewish structural linguist, semiotician, an apprentice of Antoine Meilletand his successor, who, in his later years, became enlightened by the structural view of language through the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, although he was unwilling to grasp it at first, being...

 have used mostly an opposition between the first two of them but White refers to an earlier classification, adopted by Giambattista Vico

Giambattista Vico

Giovanni Battista ' Vico or Vigo was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist....

 and contrasts metaphor with irony.
The exemplary figures chosen by White present the ideal type

Ideal type

Ideal type , also known as pure type, is a typological term most closely associated with antipositivist sociologist Max Weber . For Weber, the conduct of social science depends upon the construction of hypothetical concepts in the abstract...

s of
historians and philosophers.

Synoptic table of Hayden White's Metahistory

Trope	Mode	Emplotment	Argument	Ideology	Historian	Philosopher
Metaphor	Representational	Romance	Formist	Anarchist	Michelet	Nietzsche
Metonymy	Reductionist	Tragedy	Mechanicist	Radical	Tocqueville	Marx
Synecdoche	Integrative	Comedy	Organicist	Conservative	Ranke	Hegel
Irony	Negational	Satire	Contextualist	Liberal	Burckhardt	Croce

Reception

Frank Ankersmit

Frank Ankersmit

Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit is professor of intellectual history and historical theory at the University of Groningen....

 has forcefully asserted the importance of Metahistory for the English speaking world . In the view of Ankersmit and like-minded scholars, White's work has made obsolete the view of language as neutral medium in historiography and has provided a way to treat methodological issues at a level higher than elementary propositions and atomic facts. So, with it, "philosophy of history finally, belatedly, underwent its linguistic turn

Linguistic turn

The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy and the other humanities primarily on the relationship between philosophy and language....

 and became part of the contemporary intellectual scene."

Norman Levitt

Norman Levitt

Norman Jay Levitt was a mathematician at Rutgers University. He was born in The Bronx and received a bachelors degree from Harvard College in 1963. He received a PhD from Princeton University in 1967...

 has pointed White out as
"the most magisterial spokesman" for relativistic

Relativism

Relativism is the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration....

 post-modernist
historiography, where "[w]hen one particular narrative prevails, the
dirty work is invariably done by 'rhetoric', never evidence and logic,
which are, in any case, simply sleight-of-language designations for
one kind of rhetorical strategy" . But in making such criticism, Levitt failed to employ evidence of his own. He failed to acknowledge that White was actually a harsh critic of postmodernism, referring to Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...

, Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes

Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...

 and Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...

 as the "absurdist critics".

White can also be seen as a traditional moralist, and he has
asked of historical and fictional narrative “…on what other grounds
[than moralism] could a narrative of real events possibly conclude?
[…] What else could narrative closure consist of than the passage from
one moral order to another? White himself denies being a relativist or post-modernist, averring the
reality of events in the past is not contradicted by literary
portrayals of those events.

The mainstream historical discipline has been lukewarm about White, although traditional historians have sometimes found his work more relevant than that of most postmodernists. The historian Arthur Marwick praised Metahistory as "a brilliant analysis of the rhetorical techniques of some famous early nineteenth-century historians ... [who wrote] well before the emergence of professional history." But he went on to complain that "White seems to have made very little acquaintanceship with what historians write today."