Biography: Historical
Author’s name:
Birgitte Possing, Research Professor, dr.phil.
Address:
The Danish National Archives, Rigsdagsgården 9, DK-1218 Copenhagen K, Denmark
e-mail: bp@sa.dk phone: + 45 41 717 309 or mobile + 45 21 69 8606
Fax: + 45 3315 3239
Cross-references:
See also: Biography and Society; Social Constructivism; Postmodernism; Ethics and Val-
ues; Gender Studies; Comparative Studies; Privacy: Legal Aspects; Prosopography (Collec-
tive Biography); Autobiography; Life Course in History; History and Literature; History and
the Social Sciences; Antiquity; The Middle Ages; Enlightenment; Modernity in History.
Abstract:
This article defines the historical biography as encompassing both a reconstruction of a hu-
man life, and a representation of a human individual. It shows that the historical biography
is a genre that verges on a series of genres and disciplines. The history of the historical bi-
ography reaches from antiquity to present days, and the genre is characterised by variety and
diversity, both in historical outlook, medias, methodology, and in a cornucopia of categories
and forms. Different aims, archetypes, and methodologies of the historical biography have
developed the genre into a prism for a mulitude of preoccupations, until ‘the biographical
turn’ in history during the first decade of the 2000’s augured the genre of the historical bi-
ography as an interdisciplinary analytic field in it’s own right, placed in a battlefield of mul-
tifarious narrative forms.
Key Words:
Reconstruction of a life, representation of a life, one way of telling history, a genre of varie-
ty and diversity, a branch of historiography, the classical Hellenistic biography, hagiog-
raphy, the secular chronicle of an individual life, the art of human portraiture, the modern
life story, literary historical biography, life-work-and-times biography, life narrative, psy-
cho-historical biography, prosopography, collective or relational biography, point of orien-
tation in human life, prism biography, biographical turn in history, interdisciplinary genre,
ethical accountability
2
Biography: Historical
Definition
Historical biography (from the Greek historia: inquiry, knowledge; bios: life; grafein: writ-
ing) is a reconstruction of a human life, and a representation of an historical individual.
Thus, the notion of biography encompasses more than a pure life depiction. It encompasses
both the events of a life, the narrative of a life, and the interpretation of it’s characteristics.
The historical biography represents one of many ways of telling history. Traditionally, biog-
raphy places the individual at the center of the narrative, instead of larger analysis of dy-
namics, structures and events. As such, biography has been a controversial genre within the
scholarly writing of history for centuries.
The historical biography is a genre characterised by variety and diversity, both in
historical outlook, medias and methodology, and in a cornucopia of categories and forms. In
terms of genre, historical biography verges on autobiography, literary biography, the tradi-
tional tale, the life story, and the biographical novel. In specialist professional terms, the
historical biography verges psychology, sociology, anthropology, history and literature. In
terms of protagonist, the historical biography is open to everyone and anyone, statesmen
and farmers, generals and artists, philosophers and scientists, heroes and villains, women
and men. As regards time-scale, historical biography has existed since the antiquity, and up
to the present. All this makes it an extremely complex and deeply fascinating genre. In pre-
sent times, the historical biography is a multimedia phenomenon from the highest academic
publications in different disciplines to the popular journalist biography, and the electronic
life stories of the entertainment industry. It diverges from fiction, but in it’s narrative form
it shares genre with the modern novel, which has long since broken with linear narrative in
recognition that the passage of real life is fragmented.
2000 years of the historical biography
Since antiquity Western historical biography has been regarded as a branch of historiog-
raphy and has developed from being an ethical-humanistic genre to being a genre consisting
of various methodologies, forms and styles within 21st -century specialised scholarship. As
a genre, biography in the West is considered to have been established by the Greek Plutarch
(45-120 AD), who published the comparative lives of Greek and Roman statesmen Bioi
Parallelloi. This work, together with Tacitus' De vita Agricolae (AD 98), Diogenes Laër-
tius' biographies of Greek philosophers (3rd century AD), and Svetonius’ De Vita
Caesarum (AD 121) characterised what has been called the classical hellenistic biography,
built upon the fundamental principles of ethics: the central figures were either commended
for having fulfilled their duty or censured for falling into the trap of ambition or arrogance.
The aim was didactic inspiring the general audience to become an ethical acting subject.
Also the Christian gospels of the New Testament are seen as ideal biographies of antiquity.
The classical biography-type was maintained throughout the Middle Ages. A sidelong con-
2
3
sideration must here be given to China's great historian Sima Qian, who very early in histo-
ry developed a biographical form which belongs to a much later Western epoch: Shiji (145-
85 BC). This work contains biographies, not just of eminent statesmen and soldiers, but
also of individuals such as fortune-tellers, courtiers and murderers. A modern approach, in
present Western terms, was demonstrated by Sima Qians contemporary, the poet and liter-
ary historian Liu Xiang, whose work Lienü zhuan (78-79 BC) shows that female personali-
ties in China were already at this stage considered worthy of biographical studies.
The Greek-Roman golden age of biography vanished with it’s empires, and in ac-
cordance with the requirements of the church and spiritual need, the Middle Ages saw the
development of the martyr biography (e.g. John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, 1563), and the
manifold lives of holy men and women, known as hagiographies.The purpose was didactic
and the central character was presented as a model of Christian propriety and public virtue:
God's creation was portrayed as an individual who, in the course of a lifetime, developed as
a moral example to others, or whose destiny was first fulfilled in death. The borderline be-
tween biography and hagiography was broad during the Middle Ages. Christian funeral
sermons with the focus on the devotional every day life belief in God included biographical
life stories of men and women not belonging to the educated people of culture. Christianity
and the Christian biography opened the door to the reception of the hagiographical tradition.
At the same time though, a non-hagiographic model was also used for biographies of
princes and emperors, with Einhard's Vita Caroli Magni (829) frequently cited as being the
most important. The secular approach to historical biography was introduced during the
Italian Renaissance, a change which continued further afield from the 17th up to the 19th
century. The decisive biographical innovation came from Italy with Francesco Petrarcha’s
(1304-74) De Viris Illustribus and developed from Giovanni Boccaccio's (1313-75) sense
for the specific, the classical times and the secular in De Claris Mulieribus and Vita di Dan-
te Alighieri. Petrarcha’s and Boccaccio’s glorification of brilliant individualities connected
to the much later liberal individualism in society. Early women encyclopedias from Germa-
ny confirm this tendency. Biographical literature became that extensive during the 18th and
the 19th century that E M Ottinger's 1854 bibliography of biographical literature was only
rudimentary, even though it was wide-ranging.
From the end of th 18th century, J Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) is still
singled out as the pioneering biography of the era, as it was based on empirical material in
the form of letters, private papers, conversations, interviews and personal observation of
Samuel Johnson's comportment. This was the first biography to construct a nuanced, can-
did personality focusing on the character of the protagonist. In the historical biography of
the time, the history of human achievement was fundamentally the story of imposing male
heroes. In the biographical discourse of the 19th century, also Thomas Carlyle’s lectures On
Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841) have a paradigmatic position
claiming “the History of the World” to be the biographies of great men. Thus claming biog-
raphy as a branch of history, employing similar processes of research and scholarship in the
making of biography, he claimed historical biography as essentially the chronicle of an in-
dividual’s life journey whereas Boswell and Johnson had claimed it an art of human portrai-
ture. This difference of perception illustrates the eternal question on history versus biog-
3
4
raphy that has hung over historical biography from antiquty to the present days. But still, at
the end of the 19th century, it was the exceptional (male) person and the developmental pro-
cess which characterised the 'life-and-letters' biography. Even though ideas and people from
the community at large were incorporated into the biographies via reference to letters, and
via learned, illustrious and strange women, there was generally no trace of historical reflec-
tion on the individual and society nor any change of the skewed gender balance in the genre
of historical biography. Here, the Russian GV Plekhanov was a pioneer introducing the
issue of the dynamics between the individual personality and the society as a historical
transformation factor with The Role of The Personality in History (1898). The impact of his
work in Western historical biography seems to be limited.
The modern life story, as 20th-century historical biography has been called, came
about as the result of the crisis for humanism, Christianity and rationalism which followed
in the wake of Darwinism and psychoanalysis as developed during the 19th century. The
modern life story in literary history was introduced with L Strachey's Eminent Victorians
(1918), which came to play the same revolutionary role for historical biographers of all pro-
fessions as Boswell had played for biography in the 18th and 19th centuries: the introduction
of the artistic, interpretative biography, given form via selection, concentration and interpre-
tation of the sources. The idea was to get behind the myth of the subject of the biography
and pave the way for the writing of biographies of men and women. Another member of the
famous Bloomsbury group, V Woolf, went even further in her book The Art of Biography
(1939): Rather than attempting to escape the limitations of the genre as Strachey had, Woolf
urged biographers to endorse them by taking the front position “testing the atmosphere,
detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions”. The biographer’s
sense of truth had to be alive, because biography was “only at the beginning of its career; it
has a long and active life before it, we may be sure – a life full of difficulty, danger, and
hard work” (1939). Thus, both Strachey and Woolf positioned themselves as pioneers in the
20th century paradigm of literary historical biography. L Edel (1957) published the most
influential post-war study of the biography, which he honed throughout his life's work un-
der the motto: "A writer of lives is allowed the imagination of form but not of fact." (1984).
Literary biography became a well-established genre in its own right. Within this genre, the
post-modernists IB Nadel (1984), WH Epstein (1987) and P Bourdieu (1986) have sought
for a poetics of biography by pointing out that definitive life-portraits are not to be found.
Biography could be “collective”, too, involving a comparison of several lives or an
analysis of a number of lives tighter, linked through a central theme, as Plutarch’s Parallel
Lives, Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, and in a modern understanding, P Rose’s Parallel
Lives (1983) on a number of famed English married couples in the nineteenth century, and
LW Banner’s Intertwined Lives on Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict (Banner 2003).
Biography as a Methodological Approach
In contrast, within the historical and sociological disciplines, the historical biography re-
mained a methodology in understanding the significance of the historical individual and the
subjective experience, rather than becoming a genre in itself. Nevertheless, the historical
4
5
biography vividly developed during the 20th century displaying a multitude of biographical
methodologies. Furthermore, the number of published historical biographies increased.
Most important was the emergence of the life-work-and-times biography, in which the indi-
vidual was contextualized in the light of contemporary society. A characteristic of the 20th
century historical biography was that male heads of state, with a few exceptions, still were
the focus of interest throughout the century, in spite of the first and the second wave femi-
nism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Another characteristic was that biographical critique and
a theoretical debate on biography as a genre intensified at regular intervals without being
carried out systematically. A new aspect was incorporated into the genre: demythologisation
and unmasking of the protagonist: “Formerly we used to canonize our heroes; today we
vulgarize them” (O Wilde). Finally, historical biography was influenced by both academics
and artists. Thus, serious biographical literature covered the entire spectrum from not very
accessible treatises to stylistically inviting reading.
As already mentioned, the sociological and historical professions regarded the biog-
raphy critically throughout the century even though the publications of historical biog-
raphies were manifold (Possing 2005; Rosengren & Östling 2007; Klein 2009; Caine 2010).
Historical-sociological biographers and literary biographers began to draw a little closer
together after the 1930s. This drawing together continued throughout the rest of the century:
literary-framed biography became more scholarly-framed and historical-, sociological-, an-
thropological- and natural science-framed biography became more literary-framed claiming
that the more objective a biography the more lifeless and hollow it became (Kendall, 1965;
Madélenat, 1984). The psycho-historical biography did not really establish a firm footing
within the humanities and the social sciences, as did the life narratives growing into a para-
digmatic trend of mixing autobiography and biography in literature and history at the turn
of the millennium.
Sociologists have used historical biography as a methodology in an understanding of
the significance of subjective experience. Pioneers in this respect were F Znaniecki & W
Thomas (1918-20) who presented the individual and groups of individuals as both creative
and created in social evolution, thus introducing prosopograhy. The life history perspective
was followed up by the Italian sociologist F Ferrarotti (1983) who saw the individual as an
active pivot in respect of the structures and history of society. Life histories have also been
found interesting by late-20th-century anthropologists wishing to promote subjective expe-
rience as a factor in the creation of personal identity (Crapanzano, 1980; Loriga 1996). An-
thropologists have considered biography to be a participant observator in a cross-cultural
and cross-epochal dialogue with the historical subject.
The mentalities-historians influenced the historical biography, especially the French
Annales-school, and its preoccupation with personification and its hermeneutic, mentalities-
historical studies. In her innovative study of 16th-century Martin Guerre (1983), N Zemon
Davis used new ideas, concepts and methodologies from anthropology, ethnography and
literary criticism to examine the dilemma of truth and doubt in historical research. Percep-
tion of a central figure became the result of a communicative process between two cultures
and two people, not an objective description. J-P Sartre's concept of interaction between
the life lived and the written text inspired the development of the dialectic biography. In
5
6
Denmark and the Scandinavian countries, the historical figure within this tradition was in-
terpreted as both the bearer of a cultural convention and a cultural agitator (Possing 1992;
Klein 2009). Sociologists, ethnologists and historians have all used reminiscence, the oral-
history tradition, interviews, and private papers as empirical source material via which to
understand social action in a wider perspective as a confrontation with the positivist, Marx-
ist and structuralist thinking which has starved the biography of life. The objective was a
de-mythologisation of major figures: "A modern biographer may or may not choose to re-
veal the intimate, the amorous details of a life, but he must, if he is good at what he does,
probe beneath its public, polished self." (Pachter 1979).
Nonetheless, academic historians were ambivalent about the genre of biography. It
remained the professions’ unloved stepchild (Nasaw 2007) og courtesan (Possing 2012),
because many historians were skeptical of the capacity of biography to convey the kind of
analytically sophisticated interpretation ot the past that academics expected (Robert Schnei-
der, quoted by Nasaw 2007). At the turn of the millennium, historians still characterized
biography as a degraded form of historical writing.
The Budding Renaissance of Biography
In the light of a quarter-century's interest in social- and mentalities-history and historical
narrative, the historical biography, with its focus on the individual above, and as part of
community, class and social group, underwent a renaissance. The role of historical biog-
raphy as a point of orientation in human life was one of several reasons for it’s popularity as
a genre at a time when belief in the great utopias disappeared with the end of the Grand
Narratives: Historical biography became the prism for a multitude of preoccupations. The
1990s saw a desire for images of women and men as creative, reflective, doubting and de-
termining individuals, and a wish to leave behind the tendency to reduce specific singularity
to social regularity. More historians with G Levi (1989) in the lead expressed this need for
open reflection by pointing out that, more than ever, the ambiguous biography was a central
preoccupation for historians. The biography became a sanctuary for dramatic, old-fashioned
narrative amidst a deconstructing and fragmented era. It facilitated reflection on the human
ideal in the perspective of the flawed living individual, preventing biography to become
eulogy.
The renaissance of biography was a manifestation of a genuine renewal of the genre,
with its source in inspiration from advanced literature and the new gender studies, and in
the critical question about the extent and manner in which history is created by people and
how a life can be decoded. On the one hand, historical biography made a justifiable demand
to set the agenda via a re-humanisation of the humanities, which meant that passion, irra-
tionality and human idiosyncrasy were drawn into an understanding of an individual's life's
work (Caine 2010; Hamilton 2007, 2008; Klein 2009). On the other hand, the genre's re-
spectability was contested time and again, and still, it was not secured a serious, scholarly
profile: Some maintained that biography choose them while they were engaged on other
research. Ambivalence in relation to placing the biography as a genre within historiography
seemed to be the result of an ongoing opposition to a consideration of single characters.
6
7
Individual lives, especially the private, were considered as irrelevant or inappropriate to the
understanding of history, scholarship or art by the structuralist, positivist and postmodern
anti-biographers.
But in spite of being left out in the cold, the genre imposed itself again and again.
This was further illustrated by the reaction of post-modern and -structuralist critics such as
Derrida, Foucault and Barthes, who called the historical biography 'impossible to use as
reference', 'spurious', 'profit-mongering in intimacy' or, conversely, a thanatography - an
account of a person's death. Bourdieu used the expression 'the biographical illusion' (1986),
by which he meant that a life story had no direction and thus could not be construed in a
chronological order. Against such criticism social constructivist historians stressed that a
human individual had to be conceived as a part of the surrounding society, that biography
did not represent a life as a continuum, but as a construction of many identities, and that
historical biography could and should de- and reconstruct a life (Macey 1993; Margadent
2000). The biographical turn in history, literature, other sciences, the media, and in the en-
tertainment industry became reality at the turn of the millennium.
The Biographical Turn
During the first decade of the 2000’s, historical biography underwent a renewal: It exploded
in a cornucopia of publications, and historians identified the biographical turn in history.
Historical biography changed from an approach in history to becoming an inherently inter-
disciplinary and self-assertive genre calling itself the “new biography” (Margadent 2001).
This was especially influenced by feminists, postmodernists, and race theorists. Feminists
and postmodernist focused on the diversity and complexity of personalities, movements and
institutions decrying “essentialism”. Theorists of race focused on the marginalized black
and Afro-American groups who had suffered oppression and discrimination raising broader
issues on transnationalism in post-colonial studies. Already during the 20th century, histori-
cal biography as a field of interest had developed from a conscious mythologisation of
prominent, historical figures to a critical, manifold storytelling of public, national, transna-
tional, and anonymous historical lives.
In the light of the abundance of publications that pawed their ways during first dec-
ade of the second millenium, the biographical genre can be understood from two perspec-
tives: Firstly, the fact that historical biography has been despised and looked upon with
condescension, albeit in the international forum it is a two-thousand-year-old genre (Ege-
land 2000; Hamilton 2008; Banner 2007). Not gaining respect or dignity, paradoxically
scholars and journalists have produced a cornucopia of biographical works during the last
twenty years. Historical biography seems to be much appreciated by the general audience. It
is like a courtesan, in constant demand and much visited, but taboo and referred to with
disrespect by academic society. As the courtesan is visited by men, so too the biography has
been preoccupied with men. Statesmen, kings, financiers, scientists, scholars and authors of
the male sex have populated the genre, which has only within the last decade become
properly accessible to women and ordinary, anonymous people (Larsson 2001; Banner
2003; Huismann, Ribberink, Soeting & Hornung 2012; Possing 2012). The well-known
7
8
gender imbalance of the historical biography is changing and has altered with the biograph-
ical turn in history. Still more historical biographies have female protagonists, or female
biographers. This phenomenon was pioneered by authors and scholars with experience from
the modern fields of women’s history and gender studies (Moi 1994; Banner 2003; Ben-
habib 2003; Churchwell 2004; Larsson 2001; Hirdmann 2006; Possing 1992, 2007).
Secondly, historical biography underwent a major renaissance at the end of the twen-
tieth century – in the Scandinavian countries, all over Europa, and in most of the western
world. It exploded as part of the popular ‘experience economy’ and in the academic culture.
Since the turn of the millennium, the spirit of our times has been coloured by “the biograph-
ical turn” (Hamilton 2008; Caine 2012) and “le retour de la biographie” (Klein 2009). This
can be explained as an element of the individualistic or individualising zeitgeist following
the demise of the Grand Narrative. In present days, there is hardly a conference or a sympo-
sium in the area of humanities and social sciences that does not have a session or a paper on
the subject of biography. National and international networks of auto/biographical authors
and scholars are blooming. Also autobiography and the myriad forms of life story / life nar-
ratives have exploded as a sphere of interest.
The parameter for the evaluation of a historical biography is most often the dialecti-
cal 'life-work-and-times' biography with a balanced analysis of the individual situated in the
larger context. Or with an analysis of the power structure and the dynamic interplay be-
tween the individual and the society. Most are based on archival material and some even on
detective-like research. Some historical biographies skew the depiction perspective at the
expense of historical analysis, others focus on more simple life depiction at the expense of
analysis (Rosengren & Östling 2007; Banner 2009).
The historical biography can also be written as a prism in which the light of history
is refracted and the perspective raises the central figure as representative of a time, a histor-
ical situation, a type, a social phenomenon or a culture. Or it can be written as a collective
or relational biography comparing mores lives as in the tradition of Strachey (1918), Rose
(1983), and as seen in Banner (2003) or Anneke Ribberink’s comparison of the prime min-
isters Margaret Thatcher and Gro Harlem Brundtland (Huismann et al 2012).
Challenges in the wake of the biographical turn
At the turn of the millennium the historical biography was in the process of redeveloping
'l'ecriture historique', historical writing. After the biographical turn in history the challenge
of the historical biography changed: Despite the biographical flood, there was no well-
developed critical tradition. Neither universities nor schools of higher education offered
specific training in the all-round study of biography: “Its ethics, like the history and theory
behind it, thus go largely unaddressed, while at a practical level there are still relatively few
courses offered to those who wish to write a biography, whether big or small. Would-be
biographers are thus left largely to their own devices, scrabbling for advice and examples in
every direction” the British biographer and historian Nigel Hamilton wrote in 2008. Biog-
raphers from Plutarch to Ian Kershaw, the biographer of Hitler (2008) have hard-won expe-
riences in depicting real lives, and in representing their stories in the historical biographies.
8
9
Experiences from the reconstructions of human life, and the representations of historical
individuals through two thousand years have shaped the biographical conventions: Tradi-
tionally, every biography is a life from cradle to grave, every biography has an intention, a
plot, an agenda or a motive beyond that of telling a life, every biography is shaped by the
biographical triangle (the relation between the biographer, the protagonist and the audi-
ence), and every biographer holds the fate of someone else in their hands. At the biograph-
ical turn in history, all these four conventions are challenged as well as being used by pre-
sent historical biographers. The biographical turn not only happened because of the post-
Freudian Western world’s inclination to psycho-historical analysis. It also happened be-
cause the historical biography became part of the democratic project in an increasingly
globalised community. Historical biography expresses interest in the individual, and it’s
place in culture and society.
The new knowledge of the historical biography is to be found in the interdisciplinary
analytic field known as biographical studies. This field distinguishes between the genre,
this being the empirical narratives of individual lives as they can be read from antiquity to
the present day, and the academic discipline, which this genre comprises. The biographical
sphere is by it’s very nature interdisciplinary, because a single historical biography borders
on many other genres, subjects and narrative traditions; it raises the issues of politics, social
relations, economics, and culture, ancestry, kinship, family, sexuality, psychology, and
friendship (Klein 2009).
Thus, the historical biography has turned into a interdisciplinary sphere and a genre,
placed in a battlefield of multifarious narrative forms. Only lately, biographers have startet a
theoretical work of building bridges between types, intentions, methodologies and narrative
techniques. Historical biography is in the frontline of tackling the unwieldy ethical account-
ability vis-à-vis an increasing public pressure on the right to invade the private lives of pub-
lic personalities (King 2005; Baets 2009, 2010). And last, but not least, the historical biog-
raphy is in the vanguard of understanding the influence of the inclusion of women in the
public arena to 21st century changes in the genre that during the 2oth century was called
“the science of man” (Edel 1957; Huismann et al 2012).
Bibliography
Alpern, Sara (ed. 1992): The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Mod-
ern American Women, Illinois
Arnaud, Claude (1989): “Le Retour de la biographie: d’un tabou á l’autre”, pp. 40-47, Le
Débat, no. 54
Ambjörnsson et al. (ed. 1997): Att skriva människan. Essäer om biografin som livshistoria
och vetenskaplig genre, Umeå
Ascher, C et al. (ed. 1993): Between Women. Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and
Artists Write About Their Work on Women, Boston
9
10
Baets, A De (2009): Responsible History, New York & Oxford
Baets, A De (2010): Posthumous Privacy, 21st International Congress of Historical Scienc-
es, August 2010, Who Owns History? Sources Past and Present, Amsterdam
Banner, L W (2003): Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle,
NY
Banner, L W (2009): Biography as History, The American Historical Review, 579-87, vol
114, n 3, June
Benhabib, S (2003): The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, New York
Bertaux, D (ed. 1981): Biography and Society. The Life History Approach in the Social
Sciences. Sage Studies in International Sociology 23, ISA, Beverly Hills
Boccaccio, G (1354-5): Vita di Dante Alighieri (Das Leben Dantes, transl. Taube O. , Leip-
zig
Boccacio, G (1355-59): De Claris Mulieribus, Concerning Famous Women, transl. G. Gu-
arino, 1964, Rutgers
Blanning, T.C.W & Cannadine, D(eds. 1996): History and Biography. Essays, Cambridge
Boswell, J (1791): The Life of Samuel Johnson, London
Bourdieu, P (1989): L’Illusion biografique, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no.
62/63, June. Editions de Minuit, Paris
Bödecker, H E (ed. 2003): Biographie Schreiben, Göttingen
Carlyle, T (1841): On Hero, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, London
Caine, B (2010): Biography and History, Theory & History, Hampshire
Clifford, J (ed. 1962): Biography as an Art: Selected Criticism 1560-1960, London.
Collins, D (1980): Sartre As Biographer, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London.
Crapanzano, V (1980): Tuhami. A Portrait of a Maroccan, Chicago, London.
Davis, N Z (1983): The Return of Marten Guerre, Cambridge
Dilthey, W (1970): Die Biographie, Gesammelte Schriften, Stuttgart.
Eakin, P J (ed. 2004): The Ethics of Life Writing, Cornell
Edel, L (1957): Literary Biography, London
Edel, L (1984): Writing Lives. Principia Biographia, New York
Egeland, M (2000): Hvem bestemmer over livet? Biografi en historisk og litterær genre,
Oslo
Einhard (829 AD): Vita Caroli Magni
Epstein, W H (1987): Recognizing Biography, Philadelphia
10
11
Ferrarotti, F (1983): Biography and the Social Sciences, 56-80, Social Research
Foxe, J (1563): Books of Martyrs
Friedson, A M (ed. 1981): New Directions in Biography, Honolulu
France, P & St Clair, W (eds. 2002): Mapping Lives. The Uses of Biography, Oxford
Fromm, G (1986): Essaying Biography. A Celebration for Leon Edel, Honolulu
Garraty, J A (1957): The Nature of Biography, New York
Hamilton, N (2007): Biography. A Brief History, Harvard
Hamilton, N (2008): How to do Biography – A Primer, Harvard
Hirdman, Y (2006): Det tänkende Hjärtat. Bokan om Alva Myrdal, Stockholm
Huismann M et al (eds. 2012): Life Writing Matters in Europe, Amsterdam
Johnson, S (1759): The Idler, London
Kendall, P M (1965): The Art of Biography, London
King, M (2001): Tread Softly For You Tread On My Life, Auckland, New Zealand
Klein, C (ed. 2009): Handbuch Biographie. Methoden, Traditionen, Theorien, Stuttgart
Laërtius, D (3rd centure AD): Vitae Philosophorum
Larsson, L (2001): Sanning och Konsekvens, Stockholm
Le Goff, J (1989): ”Comment écrire une biographie historique aujourd-hui? ”, Le Débat 54
Levi, G (1989): “Les usages de la biographie”, Annales ESC 6: 1325-36
Liu Xiang (78-79 BC) : Lienü zhuan, Biographies des Femmes Illustres, transl.1963 M.
Kaltenmark, Peking
Madelenat, D (1984): La Biographie, Paris
Macey, D (1993): The Lives of Foucault, London
Margadent, J B (ed. 2000): The New Biography. Performing Femininity in Nineteenth Cen-
tury France, Berkeley
Merrill, B & West, B (eds. 2009): Using Biographical Methods in Social Research, London
Moi, T (1994): Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, Oxford 1994
Momigliano, A (1971): The Development of Greek Biography: Four Lectures, Cambridge
Montaigne, M de: Essays, vol. 3 (1580), translated by Charles Cotton, New York 1910
Nadel, I B (1984): Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, London
Novarr, D (1986): The Lines of Life. Theories of Biography 1880-1970, Indiana
Ottinger, E M (1854): Bibliographie biographique, 1-2, Brussels
Pachter, M (1979): Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art, Washington DC
11
12
Plechanov, G V (1898): K Voporsu o Roli Lichnosti v Istorii [The Role of the Individual in
History, transl. 1946], in: Nauchnoe Obozrenie 3-4
Plutarch: Bioi Parallelloi, (AD 125). Reprint Parallel Lives, 11 vol. (1958-68), London
Possing, B (1992): Viljens Styrke. Natalie Zahle. En Biografi, [with English summary:
Strength of Will: Natalie Zahle. A Biography on Gender, Education and Empowerment],
vol. 1-2, Copenhagen
Possing, B (1997): Biographies of Niels Bohr, Karen Blixen, Johanne Luise Heiberg, Carl
Nielsen, Anna & Michael Ancher, The Danish National Bank, Copenhagen
Possing, B (2001): Awakening the Promising Soul, Copenhagen
Possing, B (2001): The Historical Biography, in Encyclopedia of Social & Behavioral Sci-
ences, 2, Elsevier
Possing, B (2004): The Historical Biography: Genre, History and Methodology, in Writing
Lives in Sports (eds. Bale et al.), Aarhus University Press
Possing, B (2010): Clara Zetkin (1857-1933). Et portræt, pp. 29-47, with English summary
in Arbejderhistorie. Tidsskrift for Historie og Litteratur, Copenhagen
Possing, B (2012): Portraiture and Re-portraiture of a Political Individual: Biography As a
Genre and as a Deconstructive Tecnique, Living Political Biography. Narrating Ideas of
Europe (eds. Lauring-Knudsen, A & Gram-Skjoldager, K), Aarhus
Possing, B (2012): In Search of the Keys for a Biographical Analyses, The Analysis in The
Making (eds. Bandak, A & Kuzmanovic, D), Routledge
Possing B (2012): Biography – an Unloved, but Much-pursued Courtesan, Biographies of
the Financial World (eds. Pehrlinge, A & Sjögren, H), Stockholm
Ratcliffe, S K (1927): “Biography should be written by an acute enemy”, a quote taken
from the former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour (1848-1930) The Observer, 30.01.1927
Rhiel, M & Suchoff, D (eds. 1996): The Seductions of Biography, New York & London
Rollysson, C (2005): A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of
Biography, Chicago
Rose, P (1983): Parallel Lives, New York
Rosengren, H & Östling, J (eds. 2007): Med livet som insats. Biografin som humanistisk
genre, Lund
Scheuer, H (1979): Biographie: Studien zur Funktion und zum Wandel einer literarischen
Gattung vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, Stuttgart.
Shortland, M & Yeo, R (eds. 1996): Telling Lives in Science. Essays on Scientific Biog-
raphy, Cambridge
Sima Quian (145-85 BC): Shiji [Historical Memoirs]
12
13
Sklar, K K (1973): Cathrine Beecher. A Study in American Domesticity, New Haven
Strachey, L (1918): Eminent Victorians, London
Svetonius, T (121 AD): De Vitae Caesarum (The Twelve Caesars), transl. Robert Graves,
Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth 1957
Tacitus (98 AD): De Vita Agricolae
Znaniencki, F & Thomas W (1918-20): The Polish Peasants in Europe and America. Mon-
ograph of an Immigrant Group, 1-5, Chicago
Wagner-Martin, L (1994): Telling Women’s Lives. The New Biography, New Jersey
Birgitte Possing
13
