 | Figural realism: studies in the mimesis effect Originally published in 1998. In his earlier books such as Tropics of Discourse and The Content of the Form , Hayden White focused on the conventions of historical writing and on the ordering of historical consciousness. In Figural Realism , White collects eight interrelated essays primarily concerned with the treatment of history in recent literary critical discourse. "'History' is not only an object we can study," writes White, "it is also and even primarily a certain kind of relationship to 'the past' mediated by a distinctive kind of written discourse. It is because historical discourse is actualized in its culturally significant form as a specific kind of writing that we may consider the relevance of literary theory to both the theory and the practice of historiography." Hayden V. White was born in Martin, Tennessee on July 12, 1928. He enlisted in the Navy near the end of World War II. He received a bachelor's degree in history from Wayne State University in 1951 and a master's degree from the University of Michigan in 1952. After spending two years in Rome on a Fulbright fellowship researching church reform in the Middle Ages, he received a doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1956. He taught at several universities including Wayne State University, the University of Rochester, Wesleyan University, Stanford University, and several campuses of the University of California system. He wrote several books including Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, The Practical Past, and The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature and Theory 1957-2007. He died on March 5, 2018 at the age of 89. (Bowker Author Biography) |
