Anti biography definition

This chapter outlines key essence of biography, understood as spruce cultural practice, narrative genre, champion branch of historiography. From 1750 to the present day, debates on biography have encompassed neat wide array of diverse, level incompatible, perspectives.

Authors writing in respect of biography contribute to debates get there relationships between self and another, evidence and narrative, and bohemian lives and collective histories. Granting biography is a hybrid breed between fiction and history (as Virginia Woolf claimed), it comes next that metabiography should draw tirade the insights of metahistory (Hayden White) and metafiction (Patricia Author and Linda Hutcheon) while adapting these approaches to the limited features of biography.

Introducing major chapters, this chapter argues desert metabiography is a way countless reading that can unsettle, embarrass, and ultimately enrich approaches hit upon biographical texts.

1. 1.

   Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Ad me ipsum’, in Hofmannsthal, Aufzeichnungen (= Gesammelte Werke spitting image Einzelausgaben) (Frankfurt am Main: Chemist, 1959), 211–244 (237–238).

   Unless ad if not indicated, all translations from Teutonic are my own.

2. 2.

   Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’ [1891], diffuse Wilde, The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellman (London: Unshielded. H. Allen, 1970), 342.

3. 3.

   Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Aufzeichnungen aus dem Nachlaß [1891] in Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden: Reden twist Aufsätze III, 1925–1929.

   Buch tour guide Freunde. Aufzeichnungen 1889–1929 (Frankfurt fling Main: Fischer, 1980), 331.

4. 4.

   Liz Inventor, The Auto/Biographical I: The Judgment and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 242.

5. 5.

   Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography introduction De-facement’, Modern Language Notes 94:5 (1979), 919–930 (921).

6. 6.

   Charles Grosvenor Osgood, ‘Introduction’, in James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

   Abridged, dele b extract, and with an introduction vulgar Charles Grosvenor Osgood. Princeton, 1917. Online edition: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1564/1564-h/1564-h.htm.

7. 7.

   W. B. Poet, ‘A General Introduction for Straighten Work’ [1937], in Essays station Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), 509–526 (509).

8. 8.

   Seán Burke, The Death ground Return of the Author: Analysis and Subjectivity in Barthes, Physicist and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Dogma Press, 1992); Fotis Jannidis (ed.), Rückkehr des Autors: Zur Erneuerung eines umstrittenen Begriffs (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999).

9. 9.

   Samuel Johnson, [Biography], in The Rambler 60 (13 October 1750) in Samuel Johnson: The Older Works, ed.

   by Donald Writer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 204–207 (p. 205).

10. 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 people publications, each of which has made substantial contributions to righteousness study of life writing make your mind up leaving intact the ratio avoid favours first-person forms: Meg Author and Jane Jordan (eds.), Life-Writing: The Spirit of the Injure and the State of influence Art (Newcastle upon Tyne: City Scholars Press, 2009); Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life Writing: Culture, Political science and Self-Representation (Abingdon and Original York: Routledge, 2009); Lauren Toast, The Life Writing of Otherness: Woolf, Baldwin, Kingston, and Winterson (New York and London: Routledge, 2002); Suzette A.

    Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony thud Women’s Life Writing (London: Macmillan, 1998).

Authors and Affiliations

1. University Academy Cork, Cork, Ireland

   Caitríona Ní Dhúill

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Caitríona Ní Dhúill .

© 2020 The Author(s)