Abstract
This chapter outlines key features of biography, understood as a cultural practice, narrative genre, and branch of historiography. From 1750 to the present day, debates on biography have encompassed a wide array of diverse, even incompatible, perspectives. Authors writing about biography contribute to debates about relationships between self and other, evidence and narrative, and individual lives and collective histories. If biography is a hybrid genre between fiction and history (as Virginia Woolf claimed), it follows that metabiography should draw on the insights of metahistory (Hayden White) and metafiction (Patricia Waugh and Linda Hutcheon) while adapting these approaches to the specific features of biography. Introducing subsequent chapters, this chapter argues that metabiography is a way of reading that can unsettle, perplex, and ultimately enrich approaches to biographical texts.
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Notes
- 1.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Ad me ipsum’, in Hofmannsthal, Aufzeichnungen (= Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben) (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1959), 211–244 (237–238). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from German are my own.
- 2.
Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’ [1891], in Wilde, The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellman (London: W. H. Allen, 1970), 342.
- 3.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Aufzeichnungen aus dem Nachlaß [1891] in Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden: Reden und Aufsätze III, 1925–1929. Buch der Freunde. Aufzeichnungen 1889–1929 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1980), 331.
- 4.
Liz Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 242.
- 5.
Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, Modern Language Notes 94:5 (1979), 919–930 (921).
- 6.
Charles Grosvenor Osgood, ‘Introduction’, in James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Abridged, edited, and with an introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood. Princeton, 1917. Online edition: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1564/1564-h/1564-h.htm.
- 7.
W. B. Yeats, ‘A General Introduction for My Work’ [1937], in Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), 509–526 (509).
- 8.
Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992); Fotis Jannidis (ed.), Rückkehr des Autors: Zur Erneuerung eines umstrittenen Begriffs (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999).
- 9.
Samuel Johnson, [Biography], in The Rambler 60 (13 October 1750) in Samuel Johnson: The Major Works, ed. by Donald Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 204–207 (p. 205).
- 10.
Trev Broughton, review of The Routledge Auto/biography Studies Reader, ed. Ricia Anne Chansky and Emily Hipchen (London and New York, Routledge, 2016), Life Writing 14, no. 4 (2017), 553–555 (553). The same could be said of the following publications, each of which has made substantial contributions to the study of life writing while leaving intact the ratio that favours first-person forms: Meg Jensen and Jane Jordan (eds.), Life-Writing: The Spirit of the Age and the State of the Art (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009); Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-Representation (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2009); Lauren Rusk, The Life Writing of Otherness: Woolf, Baldwin, Kingston, and Winterson (New York and London: Routledge, 2002); Suzette A. Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life Writing (London: Macmillan, 1998).
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Ní Dhúill, C. (2020). Introducing Metabiography. In: Metabiography. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34663-8_1
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