SOURCE: “Narrative and History,” in University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 4, Summer, 1989, pp. 538–39.

In the following review, McCallum offers a positive assessment of The Content of the Form.

No one who has read Hayden White's two previous books—Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Tropics of Discourse—can doubt his contribution to the reconceptualization of history. In Metahistory White drew on the formulations of narrative tropes in the literary theories of Northrop Frye and Kenneth Burke to examine the discursive strategies which underpinned a series of nineteenth-century histories by such divergent writers as Carlyle, Michelet, Marx, and Ranke. Tropics of Discourse expanded and extended these investigations into an engagement with the post-structuralist theories of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. White's new book, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, brings together a number of essays which are generally thematized around the problem of...