Hayden White

"Now, I want to make clear that I am myself using these terms as metaphors for the different ways we construe fields or sets of phenomena in order to ‘work them up’ into possible objects of narrative r…"

"Historians are concerned with events which can be assigned to specific timespace locations, events which are in principle observable or perceivable, whereas imaginative writers – poets, novelists, pla…"

"Like Kant before him, Darwin insists that the source of all error is semblance. Analogy, he says again and again, is always a ‘deceitful guide’ . As against analogy, or as I would say merely metaphori…"

"Readers of histories and novels can hardly fail to be struck by their similarities. There are many histories that could pass for novels, and many novels that could pass for histories, considered in pu…"

"This movement between alternative linguistic modes conceived as alternative descriptive protocols is, I would argue, a distinguishing feature of all the great classics of the ‘literature of fact.’"

"In fact, I would argue that these mythic modes are more easily identifiable in historiographical than they are in ‘literary’ texts. For historians usually work with much less linguistic self-conscious…"

"What is at issue here is not: What are the facts? but rather: How are the facts to be described in order to sanction one mode of explaining them rather than another? Some historians will insist that h…"