4 These types of plot construction correlate to four positions of ideological discouses which White defines as anarchism, conservatism, radicalism and liberalism. In this theoretical framework, historiographers can use only four ‘archetypes’ of plot structures which White defines as the archetypical genres of romance, comedy, tragedy and satire. 2 Thus, he put the theory of ‘tropes’ and, most of all, ‘ emplotment‘ (which means the narratological modelization of explanation in any historiographical narration) into the centre of his book. According to him, historiography is at least as much art as science – it is a kind of ‘protoscience’ which gains its theoretical legitimization from only narrativism. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe’ (1973) 1 provided historical research with a thoroughly self-reflexive theoretical account of its subject, the classic European historiography of the 19th century.Īpplying the theory of ‘tropology’ to history, White intended to show that historiography is always a kind of narrative and linguistic discourse. His widely read (and citicized) M agnum opus ‘Metahistory. American historian Hayden White (born 1928) is one of the most influential theorists of narratological theory and pilosophy of history since the 1970s.
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