![]() In grasping the implications of referential fragility, White articulated a quintessentially Nietzschean antipathy toward naively mimetic notions of “truth” that govern history treated as an objective mirror rather than as an imaginative construction of the past. ![]() ![]() Despite Metahistory’s manifest affinity with structuralist approaches, White’s 1973 monograph is widely viewed as having inaugurated a “postmodernist” critique of narrative historiography that resonated with the growing influence of a postwar, anti-positivist “linguistic turn” stressing the figural dynamics of texts as objects of discourse. Hayden White (b. 12 July 1928–d. 5 March 2018) was a groundbreaking critic of conventional historiography whose emphasis on the moral, rhetorical, aesthetic, and fictive valences of narrative as a mode of figuration unsettled professional historians’ tendency to disavow the role of the imagination and form in the selective arrangement of evidence. ![]()
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