Metahistory

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Robert Clark (The Literary Encyclopedia)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Domains

Concept/ Method (philosophical)

Dates

Date of occurrence 1980

Places

United States (Location)

From the Greek meta “about”.

According to Northrop Frye (Fables of Identity: Studies in PoeticMythology (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1963), metahistory is a synonym for the philosophy of history, or, at a less exalted but no less powerful level, of a system of anthropological or philosophical principles which underpin the knowledge of any historical account and are tacitly or explicitly believed by the historian to run throughout human experience, making it possible to ground an historical account in principles which are themselves not subject to the one great law of history – that everything is mutable. A famous example of a metahistorical position is found in Marx's dictum “all history is the history …

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413 words

Citation: Clark, Robert. "Metahistory". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 November 2007 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=716, accessed 23 November 2024.]

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Metahistory

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