![]() If, in the course of narrating his story, the historian provides it with the plot structure of a Tragedy, he has ‘explained’ it in one way if he has structured it as a Comedy, he has ‘explained’ it in another way. ![]() “Providing the ‘meaning’ of a story by identifying the kind of story that had been told is called explanation by emplotment. For him, then, historical representations are ultimately based on a dramatization of historical event describing historical narratives as “verbal fictions,”“whose content was invented as well as found” (White, 1978, p. According to White, there exist only four “archetypal” narrative patterns. For Hayden, historians, faced with a chaos of facts, first arrange events in chronological order (a simple form of narrative), after which they assign a beginning, middle, and end to the story, thereby constructing a plot. ![]() The term “emplotment” was coined by theorist Hayden White in his 1973 Metahistory book to refer to the way in which historians give a specific attribution of meaning to the past through specific narrative structures. ![]()
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