White, Hayden: Metahistory

1ff Introduction
Modern historical thought assumes that Western Culture can be shown to be better than those before it and those around it through the use of "history". White intends to explore the historical consciousness of the West, specifically by looking at the artifacts it produced: historical narratives and their form. He will endeavor not to critique the content of the works, but rather see if they draw upon a similar form. To do this, he will need to deduce a sample form from which they can be drawn.
5ff
White gives his terminology. Chronicles give sequences of events. Stories link certain events together to form a consistent narrative. Stories end, chronicles do not. Historians like to claim they "find" their stories in the historical data while novelists "invent" theirs, however this belies the amount of invention in historian's works. Framing, inclusion/exclusion, and narrative flow all alter the perception of events. Historians should attempt to argue for a particular story over and against others which could be drawn from the same data.
7ff
Emplotment is narrating a historical story using the techniques of particular literary frame: Tragedy, Comedy, Romance, and Satire. One of these is used by every history. They form a set of two axes, so a work might draw on a pair of them (Tragedy-Comedy and Romance-Satire). All of these are tools a history might use ti prove her/his point.
11ff
Formal Arguments can be used to make the point a historian is attempting to show through her/his story. These arguments happen through multiple methods: Formist, Organicist, Mechanistic, and Contextualist. All of these, applied to the same data, can generate differing ideas and reasons behind historical events. Formists look for sets of characteristics of events/plots. It shows the uniqueness of elements of history. Organicists depict events of history as "components of synthetic processes." They tend to show how things "grow out of" what came before. Less focused on "Laws" than "Ideals." Mechanistics tend "to be reductive rather than synthetic." They hold that there are causal laws within history. Formists would note that both Organicists and Mechanistics render individual agency out of historical fact. Contextualists want to inhabit a world where ideals/laws/truths are possible but that also does not lose individual agency.


White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1973.