Four Faces of Metahistory and one Proposal of Interpretation

Metahistory by Hayden White is a book read in many ways. Nobody can deny its significance even after forty years elapsed since its publication, when the book goes on publishing. The 1980s and 1990s, a time when White became involved in some bitter controversies, are long gone. At this moment, after the storm of the linguistic turn, we might consider Metahistory as a classical piece of historical writing, and the history of its reception a requirement to understand the history of historiography. In this paper we shall suggest four levels of reading, which may explain the different fortune and reception of the book, and a proposal of interpretation of both the reception, that turned White's masterpiece into the unexpected origin of postmodernism in historiography, and the humanist act that the ideology of Hayden White attempted to perform in 1973.