Writing Lives in Contemporary Italy

Article à paraître dans "Different Lives: Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures and Societies", H. Renders and D. Veltman (eds), “Biography Studies”, Brill Publishers, Leiden/Boston, 2020, p. 128-138.Abstract: The article provides a historical survey of the practice of biography in contemporary Italy. Addressing topics ranging from the particular relationship between biography and the nation-building process-the effort 'to make the Italians' in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries-to the different forms of telling lives in contemporary Italy, I will also examine the outlook of certain great intellectuals and historians on biography and discuss the importance of publishing firms and certain editorial collections for the practice of biography in order to understand several specific issues: national lives versus local ones; the selection of historical characters; the importance of microhistory; the biography boom of the 1970s and the 1980s; the studies about biography and the current state of research on it