Hayden White and the narrative nature of history

Abstract

Western historiography, like other social sciences, experienced an important shift in the seventies due to the emergence of the theories associated with the linguistic turn, postmodernism and postestructuralism. Hayden White was one of the historians who led this transformation in the historical discipline. He argued that a historical text could be compared to a literary artifact on the leven of the form, since both use the same instrument - narrative - to representation the truth - whose content is factual events in history and fiction in literature. This idea revolutionized contemporary approaches to the interpretation of historical texts. This paper analyzes White's theories and its effects on contemporary historical writing.