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Hayden White is a historian in the tradition of literary criticism, perhaps most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973). He is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University.
Hayden White rejected the post-R.G. Collingwood philosophy of history by brushing away previous distinctions and debates, and by rejecting the notion of causality in history.
He proposed a return to the historical text that, he thought, had been abandoned to the profit of the exclusive study of other works in philosophy of history. He requested that historians become "linguistic skepticists," and that they question their use of language.
In Metahistory (1973), White extended the use of tropes from a linguistic usage - figures of style - to general styles of discourse, underlying every historian's writing of history. He believed tropes to be historically determined, in as much as the historiography of every period is defined by a specific trope.
White did not see tropes as incompatible with the historian's freedom in his actual writing of history. He justified his position - among other things - on the basis of the historical unfolding of tropes (from metonymy to metaphor, synecdoche and, finally, irony): he situated himself within the ironic historiographical tradition, one that allowed certain elements of absurd and contradiction!
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