Figural Realism : Studies in the Mimesis Effect / / Hayden White.

• Author: White, Hayden V., 1928-2018.
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (1 online resource (xii, 205 pages))
• Notes: Originally published as Johns Hopkins Press in 1999; Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.; The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No derivatives 4.0 International License

"In Figural Realism, White collects eight interrelated essays primarily concerned with the treatment of history in recent literary critical discourse. "'History' is not only an object we can study," White observes, "it is also and even primarily a certain kind of relationship to 'the past' mediated by a distinctive kind of written discourse. It is because historical discourse is actualized in its culturally significant form as a specific kind of writing that we may consider the relevance of literary theory to both the theory and the practice of historiography.""--Jacket.

Table of Contents

Literary theory and historical writing -- Historical employment and the problem of truth in historical representation -- Formalist and contextualist strategies in historical explanation -- The modernist event -- Auerbach's literary history: Figural causation and modernist historicism -- Freud's tropology of dreaming -- Narrative, description, and tropology in Proust -- Form, reference, and ideology in musical discourse.