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

The value of narrativity in the representation of reality --The question of narrative in contemporary historical theory -- The politics of historical interpretation : discipline and de-sublimation -- Droysen's Historik : historical writing as a bourgeois science -- Foucault's discourse : the historiography of anti-humanism -- Getting out of history : Jameson's redemption of narrative -- The metaphysics of narrativity : time and symbol in Ricoeur's philosophy of history -- The context of the text : method and ideology in intellectual history.