Historiography is a literary genre. This modest suggestion has made Hayden White one of the most well known figures in the philosophy of history, literary theory, and social sciences. Since the publication of Metahistory (1973), he has reshaped the notions of history, past, and literary writing, and inspired numerous scholarly debates around the world. White has argued that historians do not only set documented past incidents into a chronological timeline, but choose which of them are the most essential for understanding historical processes – and therefore historians must first constitute the status of narrated events as “historical events”. Historical events are events, then, only insofar as they participate to some …
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Citation: Korhonen, Kuisma Johannes. "Hayden White". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 December 2008 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4691, accessed 07 October 2024.]