AustLit

'Prominent British biographer Hermione Lee declares that "the telling of narrative life-stories is the dominant mode of our times" (17). But how much does an individual life matter? How and where should its significance be weighed? In beginning work on a biography of the Australian writer Dorothy Hewett, some of the epistemological problems inherent in the genre have manifested with perhaps predictable force. Despite (or perhaps as an effect of) its booming success as a contemporary form of history, biography remains troubled by assumptions about the role of the singular subject in the national/ historical frame, and these assumptions can play out in ways that render idiosyncratic, or even illegible, non-conformist forms of living that may contest the dominant narrative of an age. When one puts together the terms cosmopolitanism, women, and biography, the questions at issue become concentrated through the valencies of place. Where is it that lives are made legible? Where do we locate the frames through which individual lives become representative, distinctive, or significant? Is biography as a mode of history dependent on older forms of belonging that globalisation's new world order is rendering unviable? To make narrative, do lives need to be contained by familiarised space and time? Does biography need the nation state?'

Source: Abstract.