
To support his thesis, White analyzes the complex writing styles of historians like Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt, and philosophers of history such as Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Croce. This latent poetic and linguistic content-which White dubs the "metahistorical element"-essentially serves as a paradigm for what an "appropriate" historical explanation should be. In this classic work, White argues that a deep structural content lies beyond the surface level of historical texts. Since its initial publication in 1973, Hayden White's Metahistory has remained an essential book for understanding the nature of historical writing.

This penetrating analysis of eight classic nineteenth-century thinkers explains how historians use literary techniques to write sophisticated historical works.
