Old and New Problems around Historical Biography

Keywords: Biography, Autobiography, life writing, historiography of the 20th and 21st centuries

Abstract

In this papper, written from the viewpoint of history, canonical texts by Virginia Woolf, Stephan Zweig, Rolland Bartres, Pierre Bordieu, Niegel Hamiliton and Jo Burr Margadant are revisited to establish minimum reference points, small windows from which to look at the very wide and diverse production of Biographies that characterize the historiography of the 20th and 21st century.                In the first section with Woolf and Zweig an old debate is recovered: the biography is a branch of literature or history; in the second section with Barthes the debate about the impossibility of this genre is recovered; in the third one, the main reasons offered by the defenders of the historical academic biography that explain its current revaluation; In the last section is pointed out the need to deepen the dialogue between the disciplines that converge in the biography.

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Author Biography

María Luna Argudín, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana
María Luna Argudín. Doctora en Historia por El Colegio de México. Sus líneas de investigación son: Historia e historiografía de los siglos XIX y XX y Desafíos para la Educación del siglo XXI. Entre sus publicaciones recientes destacan: Educación y competencias (2018), “La épica de la derrota: Apuntes para la historia de la guerra entre México y Los Estados Unidos” (2017), en Fuentes Humanísticas. Con María José Rhi Sausi (Coords.), (2015) Repensar el siglo XIX. Miradas historiográficas desde el siglo XX.  

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Published
2020-03-24
How to Cite
Luna Argudín, M. (2020). Old and New Problems around Historical Biography. Revista Fuentes Humanísticas, 31(59), 13-30. https://doi.org/10.24275/uam/azc/dcsh/fh/2019v31n59/Luna
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