The consideration of what history is in a philosophical sense. The Canadian literary critic Frye, Northrop was the first person to use this term, but it is American historian White, Hayden who has given the term its most complete meaning. For Frye it meant simply the speculative philosophy of history, while for White it is the examination both of what history is and how that has changed over time. White is particularly interested in the problematic posed by the fact that history is a form of narrative, a feature it shares with fiction, and as he shows in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973), this has a significant influence on the range of meanings that can be given to a set of basic facts. Was the French Revolution inevitable? If so, why didnât similar revolutions occur elsewhere? Was it a tragedy? If so, from whose perspective? Jameson, Fredricâs concept of metacommentary takes a similar approach to the analysis of critical theory.