A figure of speech, or mode of rhetoric, which changes or adds to the meaning of particular expressions. The main varieties of trope are allegory, metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, and irony. Tropes may also take an extended, narrative form as White, Hayden demonstrates in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) and Tropics of Discourse (1978). White uses the concept of trope to explain the way historians transform the historical record into history. For White, tropes are modes of emplotment, a way of casting a sequence of events in a specific kind of relation to one another so as to craft them into a narrative form that rises above the sheer facts. The significance of tropes can clearly be seen in the way colonial histories have been written. European historians labelled the countries they colonized as ânew worldsâ and narrated the process of colonization as âsettlementâ, thus ignoring or more pointedly glossing over the inherent violence of what was done. These narratives have since been contested by collocation scholars, and settlement has been more properly labelled invasion and occupation. Contesting the legitimacy of tropes is thus a central part of the work critical theory seeks to do.