SOURCE: A review of The Content of the Form, in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 2, June, 1988, pp. 192–94.

In the following review, Tambling finds shortcomings in The Content of the Form.

In this compilation of essays from 1979 onward [The Content of the Form], Hayden White engages four recurrent themes, though they are not set out as such: the relationship between history and narrative, the relationship between historical and fictional narrative, the place that interpretation has within the writing of history, and the Nietzschean theme of the uses and disadvantages of history for life, considering, predominantly, its political and ideological uses. The essays include four on specific theorists—Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, Paul Ricoeur, and the post-Hegelian Droysen—and four on questions involving textuality, narrativity, and history.

The essays on Jameson and Ricoeur declare White's belief in narrativized history—narrative considered, in Jameson's Political Unconscious, to offer something utopian, a...