Rethinking Metahistory: The Historical imagination in nineteenth century Europe

Abstract

Deploying the autobiographical form in this essay, Alun Munslow addresses both a reading of the nature of the text Metahistory and offers a personal contextualised history of his reading and deployment of the text in his own work.

Keywords::

• Hayden White
• Metahistory
• representation
• epistemology
• narrative

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alun Munslow

Alun Munslow is the UK Editor of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice. For 31 years he taught nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American history. However, after reading Metahistory in the mid- to late-1970s, his interests as a historian moved him initially into American Studies and then almost exclusively into historical theory and practice. His present interests centre on the nature of the aesthetics of history/historical representation.