Who Is Hayden White's The Awakening Of Historical Narrative

The Awakening of Historical Narrative In The New Historicism and The Awakening (2000), New Historicism is first discovered through “a number of influential critics working between 1920 and 1950” (The New Historicism 257). However, in that time frame, it was referred to as “the historical approach” (The New Historicism 257). This approach was based on the connections between history and narratives. What made this approach distinct from other literary criticisms is that critics began to “interpret” connections between the history of a text parallel to the narrative of a given time (or the time a text was based on). As this “new” way or criticism developed, “new” ways of thinking of texts did too. “New” progressive ideologies and discourses like

In his article, White discusses the nineteenth century’s post-structuralism view of contextualizing narrative itself into history. He addresses the different discourses provided by different historians, portraying New Historicist styles in his article himself, to emphasize the importance of historical communication. White’s stand is that history described through “chronological scales” do not provide justice to the experiences by societies (White 11). He followed anthropological discourses provided by Claude Levi-Strauss that led him to construe that “there is no such thing as a single scale for the ordering of events, but rather as many chronologies as there are culture-specific ways of representing the passage of time” (White 11). Culture shapes events and events shape culture and because of this, there is no escaping the connections between narrative and history. Narrative, in addition to providing new understandings also provide significance. “A chronicle is not a narrative, even if it contains the same set of facts as its informational content” because “narrative utilizes other codes [to produce] a meaning quite different from that of any chronicle” (White 19). White emphasizes the importance of multi-directional historical discourses because they can provide what science can struggle to do.

This is taken account because self-ownership included materialistic ownership as well. In 1882, the Married Women’s Property Act “gave married women varying rights of ownership” (Stange 280). Edna’s character was raised in Kentucky and Kentucky somewhere “with the most advanced separation of property in marriage” (Stange 281). This is a style of historical narrative like previous New Historicists employed, that recognizes that the place Edna “imaginatively” came from was also “historically” enforced. Edna’s character faced powerful, authoritative discourses that tried to shift her envisions from “right” to “wrong,” but Edna still pursued liberalism. She began to define her own discourse, one that 19th-century conditions fought to refrain her from. The Awakening (1899) was a fictional literary work that embodies factual progression today; New Historicist Margit Stange provided the many interpretations needed to bridge contemporary understandings to the historical discourses of The