The series "QUELLEN UND FORSCHUNGEN ZUR LITERATUR- UND KULTURGESCHICHTE" (Sources and Research in the History of Literature and Culture) is an established feature among the renowned publications for German Literary Studies. Edited by Mark-Georg Dehrmann and Christiane Witthöft, the series presents examples of high-quality scholarship examining literary texts in conjunction with historical cultural phenomena.
Biographics has only recently started establishing itself as a field of research, and within it this study on biographical anthropology sets new directions by giving a detailed description of the significance of anthropological and moral-didactic theories and interests for the description of strangers' life histories in a chronological traverse of over 100 years of history of the genre. In contrast to traditional locations of biographical writing between art and scholarship, novel and historiography, biography is now reviewed as anthropological case history and didactic example. Foci: biographical stances in the 19th century (Varnhagen, Stifter, Laube, Gutzkow, Droysen, Ranke, Smiles, Gottschall) - psychological and biological models - 'modern biographics' (Wassermann, Zweig, Ludwig) - national biographical texts (Ritter, Molo, Schäfer).
Christian von Zimmermann, Universität Bern, Schweiz.
"Die Zeit zwischen 1830 und 1940, so lässt sich resümierend feststellen, war für das biographische Schreiben eine der fruchtbarsten Perioden in Deutschland. Von Zimmermanns Studie bietet eine überzeugende Zusammenschau der parallelen und gegenläufigen Tendenzen innerhalb des Genres in dieser Zeit. [...] ein eindrucksvoller Beleg dafür, dass die Analyse biographischer Texte nachhaltig zum Verständnis geistesgeschichtlicher und gesellschaftlicher Entwicklungen beitragen kann."
Christian Klein in: http://www.iaslonline.de/index.php?vorgang_id=2596.
