AustLit

'In the last couple of decades, many historians have sought to move beyond the longstanding and probably futile quest to establish the precise place of biography in history and instead explore a number of new ways of thinking about the relationship between history and individual lives. One of these ways focuses on historians themselves and on the different kinds of insights that an exploration of their lives can offer. As one can see in this volume, several different approaches have been taken to this question, with some historians turning to write their own autobiographies, and exploring the broader historical understanding that can be gained from describing and analysing one’s own experience, while others have sought rather to see whether a study of the lives of particular historians, either individually or in groups, offers a new understanding of the kinds of history that they wrote and of broader developments within the discipline.' (Introduction)