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.

Alexander von Humboldt is one of the most celebrated figures of late-modern science, famous for his work in physical geography, botanical geography and climatology. This volume traces Humboldt's biographical identities through Germany's collective past to shed light on the historical instability of our scientific heroes.

Iliazd is at once a rich study of a significant figure and a thoughtful reflection on the way a biography creates an encounter with its always absent subject.

This book offers a critical update of current Wittgenstein research on the Tractatus logico-philosophicus (TLP) and its relation to the Vienna Circle. The contributions are written by renowned Wittgenstein scholars, on the occasion of the "Wittgenstein Years" 1921/1922 with a special focus on its origin, reception, and interpretation then and now. The main topic is the mutual relation between Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle (esp. Schlick, Waismann, Carnap, Gödel), but also Russell and Ramsey. In addition, included in this volume are new studies on Wittgenstein's life and work, on the philosophy of the TLP, and on the Wittgenstein family in philosophical and historical context. Furthermore, unpublished documents on Wittgenstein and Waismann from the archives are provided in form of edited and commented primary sources. As per the book series' usual format, a general part of this Yearbook covers a study on Neurath's economy as well as reviews of related publications.

David Livingstone, the ‘missionary-explorer’, has attracted more commentary than nearly any other Victorian hero. Beginning in the years following his death, he soon became the subject of a major biographical tradition. Yet out of this extensive discourse, no unified image of Livingstone emerges. Rather, he has been represented in diverse ways and in a variety of socio-political contexts. Until now, no one has explored Livingstone’s posthumous reputation in full. This book meets the challenge. In approaching Livingstone’s complex legacy, it adopts a metabiographical perspective: in other words, this book is a biography of biographies. Rather than trying to uncover the true nature of the subject, metabiography is concerned with the malleability of biographical representation. It does not aim to uncover Livingstone’s ‘real’ identity, but instead asks: what has he been made to mean? Crossing disciplinary boundaries, Livingstone’s 'lives' will interest scholars of imperial history, postcolonialism, life-writing, travel-writing and Victorian studies.

This collection of essays aims to revise genre theory and studies. Authors in this volume present and discuss different literary genres in transition. They investigate genre hybridization, transformation, reconciliation and evolution. Therefore, the volume reconceptualizes the theory according to novel texts and contexts in, for example, trans-generic film series, feminine poetry, and Arab women writing. It introduces new generic labels in travel literature and new sub-genres in Maghrebean literature. Genre blurs the boundaries between genre hierarchy, labels, and borderlines. We read a gothic text that encompasses trauma, testimony, resistance and history. Moreover, scholars contributing to this collection astutely point out that genres are hybrid yet flexible by nature. They adopt a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach to genre theory. The volume targets researchers, theorists and students reading and interpreting literary and historical texts alongside genre theory.

This volume covers a wide range of contemporary and pressing issues, namely colonialism, displacement, rape, women’s oppression and the manipulation of religious discourse through a variety of theoretical approaches to Marina Warner’s fiction. It focuses on the theories of feminism, psychoanalysis and post-colonialism through the original perspective of metabiography as engrafted diaries, letters, memoirs and chronicles communicate the voices of the oppressed and the deceased by demystifying the mythopoeia constructed around and about them. The book also reconciles undergraduates and MA students to critical and literary theory through the study of Warner’s enriching fictional works as close textual analysis blends with brief overviews of various literary theories without burdening the book or its language with forbidding jargon. This book will be relevant to students, researchers and teachers due to its methodological orientation, dealing as it does with extracts which can be converted into critical theory practice in class.

A fascinating cultural studies account of the "afterlife" of Leichhardt, revealing both German entanglement in British colonialism in Australia, and in a broader sense, what happens when we maintain an open stance to the ghosts of the past.

Biofictions sets out to explore this renewed interest in Romantic artist-figures in the context of the current renaissance of "life-writing."

This textbook is an anthology of significant theoretical discussions of biography as a genre and as a literary-historical practice. Covering the 18th to the 21st centuries, the reader includes programmatic texts by authors such as Herder, Carlyle, Dilthey, Proust, Freud, Kracauer, Woolf and Bourdieu. Each text is accompanied by a commentary placing its contribution in critical context. Ideal for use in undergraduate seminars, this reader may also be of interest for academic researchers in the areas of literary studies and history aiming to get an overview of historical questions in biographical theory. This revised and updated English language edition also includes new translations of texts by J. G. Herder and Stefan Zweig, as well as an introductory discussion on the possibility of a ‘theory of biography’. Note: Due to copyright reasons, the chapter "Sade, Fourier, Loyola [Extract] (1971)" (pp. 175–177) by Roland Barthes could not be included in the ebook.