SOURCE: A review of Tropics of Discourse, in World Literature Today, Vol. 53, No. 3, Summer, 1979, p. 565.

In the following review of Tropics of Discourse, Champagne commends White's insights into history's roots in storytelling.

Addressed to the problem of whether historical writing can remain concerned with the past and with an objective view of facts, this collection of essays [Tropics of Discourse] presents history as a narrated story, a literary document with its origins in the human imagination. The title is based upon the etymology of “tropics” and “discourse” and is intent upon suggesting the “ways or manner” of “moving to and fro.” The methodology beyond the title assumes a prelogical area of experience, forgotten by the present-day scientific posture of history and revived in order to establish the tropological basis of history. A basic thesis is the acceptance of Kenneth Burke's proposition that there have been four “master tropes...