Palgrave Studies in Life Writing: Reflecting on Biography

Ní Dhúill, Caitríona

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. 

Details

Published by: Palgrave Macmillan

Publication Date: 2021-03-10

Format: Paperback

ISBN-13: 9783030346652

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-34663-8

Dimensions: 210cm x148cm

Pages: 235