Hayden White

Kuisma Johannes Korhonen (University of Oulu)

Ed. by Christopher Hugh Gair, University of Glasgow
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 1928
Activity 1948-ongoing

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States

Activities

Primary

Literary Critic/ Historian
Literary Theorist

Resources

White's Works

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Historiography is a literary genre. This modest suggestion has made Hayden White one of the most well known figures in the philosophy of history, literary theory, and social sciences. Since the publication of

Metahistory

(1973), he has reshaped the notions of history, past, and literary writing, and inspired numerous scholarly debates around the world. White has argued that historians do not only set documented past incidents into a chronological timeline, but choose which of them are the most essential for understanding historical processes – and therefore historians must first constitute the status of narrated events as “historical events”. Historical events are events, then, only insofar as they participate to some larger historical narrative – and, according to White, the way…

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1825 words

Citation: Korhonen, Kuisma Johannes. "Hayden White". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 December 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4691, accessed 18 April 2024.]

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