Work · Science & Human Sciences
Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville and Burckhardt, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Croce read as writers: each work combines a mode of emplotment, of argument and of ideological implication, prefigured by one of four tropes – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche or irony.
Introduction
“Metahistory” appeared in 1973 with the Johns Hopkins University Press. A long introduction, “The Poetics of History”, sets out a theory of the historical work as a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse. Historians explain by emplotment – romance, tragedy, comedy or satire, after Northrop Frye – by formal argument, after Stephen Pepper, and by ideological implication, after Karl Mannheim; beneath these lies a prefiguration of the historical field in one of four tropes. The main chapters apply the scheme to Hegel, Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Marx, Nietzsche and Croce. The book became a founding text of narrativist philosophy of history and of the “linguistic turn” in historiography and has been translated into more than ten languages.
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