It is a hermeneutics of biography that sees the biographical subject (the “biographee”) as a collective construct of different memory cultures, proposing an essential instability of historical lives.
For these authors, dealing with predecessors has served such purposes as establishing the factual inadequacy of earlier efforts, staking one’s own claim against prior “myths” and “mistakes,” or has been intended simply as laying the groundwork for a new and more “definitive” study.
[3] Metabiography is thus similar to what Richard Holmes calls 'comparative biography', which analyses more than one biographical account of the same subject to reveal 'shifts and differences - factual, formal, stylistic, ideological, aesthetic'.
[4] It has been argued that in the history of science, metabiography has a long tradition of over fifty years,[5] stretching from Henry Guerlac’s study of “Lavoisier and his biographers”[6] to A. Rupert Hall’s edition of eighteenth-century Newton biographies[7] and beyond.
[8] In the field of biographies of artists and writers, the metabiographical approach was followed e.g. by David Dennis for Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827),[9] and Lucasta Miller who used it to good effect in the case Emily Brontë (1818–48).