Overview

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. 

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9783030346621

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By analyzing biographies from the end of the eighteenth century until today, Ni Dhuill shows how the concept can help us understand how biographies have been written and why they have been written as they have. ... Ni Dhuill 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)

Author Information

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.

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