Václav Sixta
Historical biographies are a traditional and successful form of writing about history present in both academia and popular culture. As a result, this form has a major impact on our ideas about the past. What do contemporary theoretical discussions about historical biographies look like? What can be said about contemporary Czech biographical production? And what concepts can inform biographical writing? The Possibilities of Historical Biography seeks to answer these questions at the intersection of theory of biography, historiography theory, and memory studies. Through the notion of the “biographical archive”, it offers its own perspective on how to appropriate the biographical form in productive and innovative ways. The book is based on the premise that “biography” is not a fixed, unchanging genre, but a fluid category of texts that is influenced by diverse cultural practices and historical sediments.