[In the following review, King offers a positive assessment of The Content of the Form.]

Over the last twenty years the philosophy of history has seen a radical shift in focus. No longer is the main point of contention whether history is a science; now it is whether and to what extent history and fiction are more alike than they are different from each other. The person most responsible for this is Hayden White, beginning with his magisterial Metahistory (1974) and continuing in his first collection of essays, Tropics of Discourse (1978).

The Content of the Form also collects essays written by White since the appearance of Tropics and it also takes as its concern the problem of history's relationship on the one hand to “reality” and on the other hand to “fictionality.” But if not an entirely new departure, it represents a narrowing of focus and a fresh emphasis on White's part. Put succinctly, White has moved away from his elaborate and sometimes too schematic categorizations of tropes, plots, ideological positions and world-views and now emphasizes the act/fact of narrativity in history and implicitly all non-fiction. Secondly, his most powerful essays in The Content of the Form address the question of the political and social, i.e. ideological, implications of the act of constructing narratives altogether. Indeed, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” and “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation” are “masterful” in the genuine meaning of that term. They demand reading—and rereading—not because one agrees with everything White offers, but because he has a knack for asking the profoundly right question and raising the cogent issue.

Shorn of all qualification, White's position seems to be grounded in the following claims. First, contrary to Paul Ricoeur's work, to which White devotes a careful and respectful essay, White claims that we construct narratives for rather than finding them in events. Secondly, a given political and social order is maintained precisely by being narrativized. Indeed, it is from within a dominant narrative that we acquire the form of “individual” subjectivity needed to maintain that order. Narratives do not reflect reality so much as they establish the condition of its possibility. Finally, though less clearly, White seems to share what is ultimately a Romantic view that it is art rather than science or history that “instantiates the human capacity for imagining a better world”—a view congenial to followers of the Frankfurt School and in a strange way to the American New Critics as well.

White's work can be challenged on many points but this book confirms that it should not be ignored, particularly by historians.