Argues for a new approach to biography: not primarily as a source of knowledge about past lives, but as a resource for thinking through and beyond the very idea of life's narratability - Covers a variety of texts from the eighteenth century to the present day- Uncovers the prehistory of the burgeoning field of enquiry now known as metabiography

Autorentext

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.

Klappentext

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.

Inhalt
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.