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This book explores the contradictions of biography. It charts shifting approaches to the writing and reading of biographies, from post-hagiographical attitudes of the Enlightenment, heroic biographies of Romanticism and irreverent modernist portraits through to contemporary experiments in politically committed and hybrid forms of life writing. The book shows how biographical texts in fact destabilise the models of historical visibility, cultural prominence and narrative coherence that the genre itself seems to uphold. Addressing the fraught relationships between genre and gender, private and public, image and text, life and narrative that play out in the modern biographical tradition, Metabiography suggests new possibilities for reading, writing and thinking about this enduringly popular genre.
List of contents
1: The Language of Biography.- 2: Visual Metaphors in Verbal Lives.- 3: Materiality, Metabiography, and Life's Resistance to Narrative.- 4: A Metabiographical Motif.- 5: Gender Politics of the Biographical Quest.- 6: Biography, Intersubjectivity, and the Not-Self.- 7: Interventions in Metabiography.- Bibliography.
About the author
Caitríona Ní Dhúill is professor in German at University College Cork and the author of
Sex in Imagined Spaces: Gender and Utopia from More to Bloch (2010). She has worked at the universities of St Andrews, Vienna, and Durham, and at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography, Vienna.
Report
"This book serves an important purpose ... . For all of us historians out there, it is essential to read this book with the knowledge that this is not only a historical analysis: it goes beyond the traditional confines of the field to look at fiction, literature, and even pictorial imagery and imagination." (Victoria Cosby, H-Net Reviews, h-net.org, October, 2021)
"By analyzing biographies from the end of the eighteenth century until today, Ní Dhuíll shows how the concept can help us understand how biographies have been written and why they have been written as they have. ... Ní Dhuíll discusses the genre more from an outsider's perspective ... very fruitfully. ... a deeper and wider insight into the challenges of biographical writing." (Henrik Rosengren, European Journal of Life Writing, Vol. 9, 2020)
