It unrolls historically. We don t spend a lot of time talking about the artwork or the artistry or whatever that the person might have made on the side. So, they concentrate on what happened and give you a person one step at a time. That s historical biography. Now, I m only talking about historical biography, but I m dividing it into two conventional biography, subaltern biography.
Conventional biography is sort of normal biography, great figures, great people, great men.
These are the biographies that usually win prizes. The quintessential conventional biography would be a biography of Abraham Lincoln. Those tell you where the person was born, perhaps what the ancestors were, the childhood, the education, the greatness and then the death. Usually, this is about one life, and you don t get very much about what was going on around the life. Those kinds of biographies usually don t have theory in them.