The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

Abstract

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