SOURCE: A review of Metahistory, in Canadian Historical Review, Vol. LVI, 1975, pp. 192–93.

In the following review, Grosskurth offers a positive assessment of Metahistory, which she hails as a “deliberately provocative book.”

Professor Hayden White of Wesleyan University is nothing if not bold. He has an amplitude of mind which does not quail before the expectation of offending the most formidable of foes. In an article published last year in History and Theory, ‘Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground,’ he pointed out the delusions under which French structuralists were deceiving themselves. Undisturbed by the murmurs of irritation, he has now in effect taken on all historians in a large book, Metahistory, whose subtitle The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe is applicable only insofar as he analyzes the work of several major historians of the period to demonstrate that since the nineteenth century ‘most historians have affected a kind of wilful...