Metahistory

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Robert Clark (The Literary Encyclopedia)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Domains

Concept/ Method (philosophical)

Dates

Date of occurrence 1980

Places

United States (Location)

Resources

Save to Bookshelf

From the Greek meta “about”.

According to Northrop Frye (Fables of Identity: Studies in PoeticMythology (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1963), metahistory is a synonym for the philosophy of history, or, at a less exalted but no less powerful level, of a system of anthropological or philosophical principles which underpin the knowledge of any historical account and are tacitly or explicitly believed by the historian to run throughout human experience, making it possible to ground an historical account in principles which are themselves not subject to the one great law of history – that everything is mutable. A famous example of a metahistorical position is found in Marx's dictum “all history is the history of class struggle”. Metahistory is therefore on a par with the idea

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

413 words

Citation: Clark, Robert. "Metahistory". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 November 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=716, accessed 23 November 2024.]

Metahistory

Domains

Dates

Places

Resources

Save this article

Leave Feedback