The limitation arises through a general mode of functioning - representation, reduction, integration or negation, which White assimilates to one of the four main tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony.

Structuralists as Roman Jakobson or Emile Benveniste have used mostly an opposition between the first two of them but White refers to an earlier classification, adopted by Giambattista Vico and contrasts metaphor with irony.

"[6] Norman Levitt has identified White as "the most magisterial spokesman" for relativist and postmodernist historiography, where "[w]hen one particular narrative prevails, the dirty work is invariably done by 'rhetoric', never evidence and logic, which are, in any case, simply sleight-of-language designations for one kind of rhetorical strategy".

[7] Be that as it may, it is unclear whether White himself would care to be closely identified with relativist and postmodernist schools of thought, given his sharp critiques of several key figures associated with those schools (not only postmodernism's outspoken official proponent, Jean-Francois Lyotard, but also—and more directly—certain unofficial poststructuralist exponents such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, whom White dubbed "absurdist critics").

For instance, Arthur Marwick praised it as "a brilliant analysis of the rhetorical techniques of some famous early 19th-century historians ... [who wrote] well before the emergence of professional history."