The Limits of Enlightenment: Enlightenment as Metaphor and as Concept

Hayden White, Professor Emeritus at the University of California (Santa Cruz), has been described as "perhaps the premier academic essayist of our times." Compulsory reading for graduate students throughout the humanities, his essays on historical representation and narrative discourse have strongly contributed to a "narrative turn" in the study of historical thought. The author of Metahistory:The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973), Tropics of Discourse (1978), The Content of the Form (1987), and Figural Realism(1999), Professor White has also published recent essays on historical fiction, witness literature, and Holocaust representation.