Hayden White probes the notion of authority in art and literature and examines the problems of meaning-its production, distribution, and consumption-in different historical epochs. In the end, he suggests, the only meaning that history can have is the kind that a narrative imagination gives to it. The secret of the process by which consciousness invests history with meaning resides in "e;the content of the form,"e; in the way our narrative capacities transform the present into a fulfillment of a past from which we would wish to have descended.