The Content of the Form

Download or read book The Content of the Form written by Hayden White and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1990-08-01 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hayden White probes the notion of authority in art and literature and examines the problems of meaning—its production, distribution, and consumption—in different historical epochs. In the end, he suggests, the only meaning that history can have is the kind that a narrative imagination gives to it. The secret of the process by which consciousness invests history with meaning resides in "the content of the form," in the way our narrative capacities transform the present into a fulfillment of a past from which we would wish to have descended.