Ebook: Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism

Hayden White's Metahistory has become a text central to all discussions of the nature of historical writing. In Tropics of Discourse White continues his exploration of the relationship between history and other literary forms.

Tropics of Discourse develops White’s ideas on interpretation in history, on the relationship between history and the novel, and on history and historicism. Vico, Croce, Derrida, and Foucault are among the figures he assesses in this work, which also offers original interpretations of a number of literary themes, including the Wild Man and the Noble Savage. White’s commentary ranges from a reappraisal of Enlightenment history to a reflective summary of the current state of literary criticism.

Tropics of Discourse delineates a discipline White calls “cultural criticism,” on which he proposes to found a general theory of criticism that will encompass a wide variety of materials, from anthropological data to science and literature. It gives insight into the context in which Metahistory was written and extends the scope while increasing the precision of the terms used in that work.

HAYDEN WHITE is Presidential Professor of Historical Studies and a faculty member of the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His 'Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe' is also available as a Johns Hopkins paperback.