This book provides a thorough exploration of this genre, from a wide range of postmodern perspectives. The Seductions of Biography brings together a number of essays which reflect in culturally critical as well as autobiographical terms on current themes and practices of contemporary biography. The impact of sexuality on our reading of public figures is addressed, as well as other issues which explore the popular and provocative nature of biography. Interdisciplinary and wide-ranging in scope, The Seductions of Biography will appeal to biographers, historians, cultural critics, and the vast population of avid biography readers. Purchase this book at Routledge Press .
Ethics is back in literary studies, philosophy, and political theory.
Where critiques of universal man and the autonomous human subject had, in recent years, produced a resistance to ethics in many fields of scholarship, today these critiques have generated a crossover among disciplines and led to theories and practices that see and do ethics otherwise. The decentering of the subject, the contributors to this volume suggest, has brought about a recentering of the ethical. The philosophers, political theorists, literary critics and physician whose essays are collected here bring the particularities of their disciplines and training to a vital complex of questions. Many of these authors express concerns that the turn to ethics is a turn away from politics towards moralism. All ultimately conclude, however, that such concerns, rather than leading away from ethics, have helped to reinvigorate the intellectual field in the present moment.