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''Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe'' is a work of historiography by Hayden White first published in 1973. On the second page of his Introduction White stated: The theoretical framework is outlined in the first 50 pages of the book, which consider in detail eight major figures of 19th-century history and the philosophy of history. The larger context of historiography and writing in general is also considered. White's approach uses systematically a fourfold structural schema with two terms mediating between a pair of opposites. ==Synopsis== According to White the historian begins his work by constituting a chronicle of events which is to be organized into a coherent story. These are the two preliminary steps before processing the material into a plot which is argumented as to express an ideology. Thus the historical work is "a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them".〔p.3〕 For the typologies of emplotment, argumentation and ideologies White refers to works by Northrop Frye, Stephen Pepper and Karl Mannheim.〔pp.7, 14 and 22, Frye N., (1957), ''Anatomy of Criticism'', Princeton ; Pepper S., (1942). ''World Hypotheses: A study of evidence'', University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, Mannheim K., (1936) ''Ideology and Utopia'', London: Routledge〕 His four basic emplotments are provided by the archetypical genres of romance, comedy, tragedy and satire. The modes of argumentation, following Pepper's 'adequate root metaphors' are formist, organist, mechanicist and contextualist. Among the main types of Ideology White adopts anarchy, conservatism, radicalism and liberalism. White affirms that elective affinities link the three different aspects of a work and only four combinations (out of 64) are without internal inconsistencies or 'tensions'. The limitation arises through a general mode of functioning - representation, reduction, integration or negation, which White assimilates to one of the four main tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. Structuralists as Roman Jakobson or Emile Benveniste have used mostly an opposition between the first two of them but White refers to an earlier classification, adopted by Giambattista Vico and contrasts metaphor with irony.〔In White's reading the epochs of Vico's ''Scienza Nuova'' are not three but four as the last age is followed by an 'ironic' episode of dissolution; he contends also that the same succession of tropes is underlying Foucault's analysis from The Order of Things; see White H., (1973) ''Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground'' in ''Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism''. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1978. p.241. In 19th century historiography the leading tropes do not follow this strict order but coexist.〕 The exemplary figures chosen by White present the ideal types of historians and philosophers. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Metahistory」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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