1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910483757403321

Autore

Ní Dhúill Caitríona

Titolo

Metabiography : Reflecting on Biography / / by Caitríona Ní Dhúill

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham : , : Springer International Publishing : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2020

ISBN

9783030346638

3030346633

Edizione

[1st ed. 2020.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xiv, 235 pages)

Collana

Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, , 2730-9193

Disciplina

808.06692

809.93592

Soggetti

Literature, Modern - 20th century

Literature, Modern - 21st century

Literature, Modern - 19th century

Literature, Modern - 18th century

Contemporary Literature

Twentieth-Century Literature

Nineteenth-Century Literature

Eighteenth-Century Literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

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.

Sommario/riassunto

"Metabiography 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. The best book about biography I have read in many years." - Craig Howes, Director, Center for



Biographical Research, Univerity of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA 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. .