Abstract

In Metahistory, White establishes a self-contained system of historical criticism which uses the nineteenth-century historical tradition as its direction and current cultural politics as its strategy. He argues that the flow of human events over time results from an interaction between the rules of tradition and the human mastery of that tradition through free will. After the spirit of Vico and Nietzsche, White considers the historical text a narrative representation which subsumes the logic of explanation. Rather than psychology and sociology, White chooses the trope as the basis of his linguistic system. Within his four-trope system, White identifies his own position as that of the ironic trope. Given tropology as the irreducible element, the four levels themselves become tropological. Metahistory is Metaphoric as it reaffirms human freedom through the creative use of language and Ironic because the rules of discourse place such affirmation "under erasure."