SOURCE: A review of The Content of the Form, in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 102, No. 5, December, 1987, pp. 1191–196.

In the following review of The Content of the Form, Flores provides an overview of White's conceptual assertions, which he then applies to examples of White's own stylistic phrases in the book.

For most cultures, narratives are relatively unproblematic vehicles for transmitting honored traditions, and the critique or rejection of narrative (by recent historians, novelists, or theorists) may signal a cultural crisis of epochal proportions. In The Content of the Form Hayden White offers eight analytic essays on the work of several eminent theoreticians of narrative, work which both addresses and may contribute to such a crisis. Among the theoreticians are Paul Ricoeur, Johann G. Droysen, Frederic Jameson, Michel Foucault, and the French Annalistes. White is particularly sympathetic to the work of Paul Ricoeur (whose as yet unfinished Temps et R...