The exemplary figures chosen by White present the ideal types of

StructuralistsĪs Roman Jakobson or Emile Benveniste have used mostly an opposition between the first two of them but White refers to an earlier classification, adopted by Giambattista Vico and contrasts metaphor with irony. Metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. Negation, which White assimilates to one of the four main tropes: Mode of functioning - representation, reduction, integration or White affirms that elective affinities link the three different aspects of a work and only four combinations (out of 64) are without internal inconsistencies or 'tensions'. Among the main types of Ideology White adopts anarchy, conservatism, radicalism and liberalism. The modes of argumentation, following Pepper's 'adequate root metaphors' are formist, organist, mechanicist and contextualist. His four basic emplotments are provided by the archetypical genres of romance, comedy, tragedy and satire. įor the typologies of emplotment, argumentation and ideologies White refers to works by Northrop Frye, Stephen Pepper and Karl Mannheim. 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'. These are the two preliminary steps before processing the material into a plot which is argumented as to express an ideology. White's approach uses systematically a fourfold structural schema with two terms mediating between a pair of opposites.Īccording to White, historians begin their work by constituting a chronicle of events which is to be organized into a coherent story. The larger context of historiography and writing in general is also considered. The theoretical framework is outlined in the first 50 pages of the book, which consider in detail eight major figures of 19th-century history and the philosophy of history. My own analysis of the deep structure of the historical imagination of Nineteenth century Europe is intended to provide a new perspective on the current debate over the nature and function of historical knowledge. On the second page of his introduction, White stated: Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe is a work of historiography by Hayden White first published in 1973.

Hayden white emplotment