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Representing Lives: The Genres of Modern Biography - MHPG847
This unit will seek to understand how the use of biography can and has rewritten existing histories. It seeks to understand the current rise in public interest in biography or life writing as well as the way in which the biographic mode is increasingly used as a key explicatory form in history and other humanist disciplines. We will briefly trace the history of the genre and then delve into examples of various kinds of biography, such as political lives, literary lives, indigenous lives, women's lives, and collective lives. It will consider how heated historical debates have reverberated through and been recast by the use of biography. We will also examine the problems of fiction and biography; arguments against biography; and modern enterprises to undertake massive regional or national biographical dictionaries.
Timetable Information
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