Books@Queen’s: Daniel Woolf

White’s central premise … is that history is essentially a form of literature that is in many ways indistinguishable from literature and there is no solid fact fiction divide. Fiction being literature, fact being history. He points out in metahistory that many of the great historians of the 19th century, which is the focus of that particular book, wrote their histories having poetically imagines what the past looked like and how it unfolded before they ever set pen to paper.

Daniel Woolf (Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s), on Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, by Hayden White

Episode host: Aidan Fallon

Find it at Queen’s University Library