Abstract

In Metahistory, Hayden White chose literary style as that form of rhetoric with which he could better understand the relationship between what historians say and how they say it. By limiting his use of rhetoric to a theory of tropics, White has reduced rhetoric to poetics and rendered his construct antihistorical. Alternatively, one should consider history as both discipline and argument and by extension use a topics rather than a tropics of historical discourse. The rules which govern the narrative argument of history more closely resemble those of law rather than those of literature. Within the discipline of classical rhetoric, it is the lines or places of argument which determine its conviction. Unlike White's poetical use of rhetoric, a topical approach can distinguish between sophisticated and naive argument, can illumine the complex relationship between history and genre, and can evaluate political discourse