Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Tropology, discourse, and the modes of human consciousness -- The burden of history -- Interpretation in history -- The historical text as literary artifact -- Historicism, history, and the figurative imagination -- The fictions of factual representation -- The irrational and the problem of historical knowledge in the Enlightenment -- The forms of wildness: archaeology of an idea -- The noble savage theme as fetish -- The tropics of history: the deep structure of the New science -- What is living and what is dead in Croce's criticism of Vico -- Foucault decoded: notes from underground -- The absurdist moment in contemporary literary theory.