SOURCE: “Hayden White and History,” in London Review of Books, September 7, 1987, pp. 17–18.

In the following excerpt, Bann discusses the lasting significance of Metahistory and offers a positive assessment of The Content of the Form.

In publishing his compendious work Metahistory in 1973, Hayden White gave currency both to a term and to a programme. His subtitle, The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, indicated the broad area of his investigations, but gave little sense of the radical originality of this programme, which was quite simply the re-examination of historiography in its written form. White had discovered a blind spot in the array of approaches to the recording of the past. While philosophers of history confined their attention to technical matters like causation, and historians of historiography elevated the individual historian at the expense of his text, the new metahistorian immersed himself willingly in the turbulent narratives of Ranke and Michelet...