Overview
- 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
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (PSLW)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
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.
Reviews
“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)
“Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography is an intelligent, carefully argued, and substantial contribution to biographical criticism and theory. The comparative range, the easy yet thorough familiarity with existing scholarship, and the remarkable degree to which Caitríona Ní Dhúill anticipates and answers objections or responses to her argument, combine to produce an exciting, thoughtful, suggestive, and valuable intervention into the production and study of biography.” (Craig Howes, Director, Center for Biographical Research, Univerity of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA)Authors and Affiliations
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Metabiography
Book Subtitle: Reflecting on Biography
Authors: Caitríona Ní Dhúill
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34663-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-34662-1Published: 10 March 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-34665-2Published: 10 March 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-34663-8Published: 09 March 2020
Series ISSN: 2730-9185
Series E-ISSN: 2730-9193
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIV, 235
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Contemporary Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Eighteenth-Century Literature