- Impacts of Total Factor Productivity on Agricultural Growth in Pacific Island Countries
- Genetic Loss in Food Crops in the Pacific: Socio-Economics Causes and Policy Issues
- An insight into public sector readiness for change – the Fiji Experience
- Regulations, Costs and Informality: The Case of Fiji
- The effectiveness of the destination websites in promoting linkages between visitors and the community in Tonga
- Hayden White and the Burden of History
- A comparative study of stress amongst teachers of the western division in Fiji
- Australia – A Hegemonic Power in the Pacific Region
- The Magnus Effect and the Flettner Rotor: Potential Application for Future Oceanic Shipping
- Irrigated ethnoagriculture, adaptation and development: a Pacific case study
- Impacts of Total Factor Productivity on Agricultural Growth in Pacific Island Countries
- Genetic Loss in Food Crops in the Pacific: Socio-Economics Causes and Policy Issues
- An insight into public sector readiness for change – the Fiji Experience
- Regulations, Costs and Informality: The Case of Fiji
- The effectiveness of the destination websites in promoting linkages between visitors and the community in Tonga
- Hayden White and the Burden of History
- A comparative study of stress amongst teachers of the western division in Fiji
- Australia – A Hegemonic Power in the Pacific Region
- The Magnus Effect and the Flettner Rotor: Potential Application for Future Oceanic Shipping
- Irrigated ethnoagriculture, adaptation and development: a Pacific case study
Hayden White and the Burden of History
Author: Anurag Subramani
Abstract
In his essays “The Burden of History” (1966), “Interpretation in History” (1972), “The Historical Text as Literary Artefact” (1974), “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” (1980) and “Getting Out of History” (1982), Hayden White discusses the main tenets of his theory of historiography, narrativity and, inevitably, the relationship between the history and literature. In the essays, White argues for a common constructivist character of history and fiction, and rejects the Rankean notion of a ‘science of history’. Drawing support from the historiographical and literary theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss, R. G. Collingwood and Northrop Frye, White suggests historians must acknowledge history’s basis in the literary arts and treat the historical text as a literary artefact in order for the discipline to regain the prestige that it enjoyed in the early nineteenth century. The kind of eclectic history that White advocates is found in Klaus Neumann’s Not the Way it Really Was, a text that itself rejects a positivist view of history.
Keywords: History, literature, narrativity, positivism, Hayden White, Klaus Neumann