Metabiography

“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.