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"History would be an excellent thing if only it were true."
L. N. Tolstoy (... 188, cited in Berlin 31)
Hayden White has dedicated his career to debunking common assumptions about the nature of historiography and the role and function of historians. Indeed, one scholar writes that we "would have to return to the nineteenth century to find a thinker who has had a greater impact on the way we think about historical representation, the discipline of history, and on how historiography intersects with other domains of inquiry" (Doran 1). Beginning with his seminal work, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) and continuing in his collections Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978), The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987), and Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (1999), White has methodically, at times brilliantly, elaborated a position that calls into question the very concept of historical knowledge by interrogating the discursive basis of historiography, both its epistemological foundations and the deep structure of its linguistic tropes and narrative devices. As White has famously stated, "All stories are fictions" (Figural Realism 9) and history-the biggest story of them all-is no exception. Indeed, in their dependence on narrative forms, tropes and devices, historians are little different from the authors of fictional works: Both tell stories, but only one of them insists that theirs is the truth. This is the crux of the matter for White. "Literary discourse may differ from historical discourse by virtue of its primary referents, conceived as imaginary rather than real events," White writes, "but the two kinds of discourse are more similar than different since both operate language in such a way that any clear distinction between their discursive form and their interpretative content remains impossible" (Figural Realism 6).
Given the kinds of issues that White raises about history as a narrative act and the antihistoricism that attends many of his discoveries, it is not surprising that he would eventually make his way to Tolstoy's novel War and Peace, the anti-historical novel par excellence of world literature. With its probing indictment of the various models of historical narrative known to Tolstoy, the novel offers a skeptical view of historiography...