SOURCE: A review of The Content of the Form, in World Literature Today, Vol. 62, No. 3, Summer, 1988, p. 516.

In the following review of The Content of the Form, Gross commends White's insightful ideas, but suggests that his “dense” and “formidable” prose may limit his audience.

Hayden White begins “Foucault's Discourse: The Historiography of Anti-Humanism,” the longest of the eight substantial essays in The Content of the Form, with the observation that the work of Michel Foucault “is extraordinarily difficult to deal with in any short account.” The same is certainly true of White's own work. White describes his book as “some of the work I have done over the last seven years in historiography and theory of narrative and on the problem of representation in the human sciences.” The essays are sophisticated theoretically, informed throughout by contemporary continental critics and philosophers. Like Foucault, Ricoeur, Jameson—some of the writers...