Metabiography

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.

“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)

• 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.