ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how spaces and sites become key factors in the writers’ work, how they are used by Mateus and Montero in the re-construction of the writers’ lives, and then shift to thinking about the experience for the reader, on foot, in situ; or reading at home. Biography as a genre has evolved in parallel with society’s tastes and expectations, but also shifts in philosophy and psychology, critical theory and literary history. From Classical ‘Lives’ to Victorian biographies of ‘Great Men’ and other eminent personalities, the idea that a life could be contained in one narrative was realised to be a fabrication, and interest grew in less famous lives that revealed the experiences of underrepresented members of society. Roland Barthes, who wrote so much on the relationship between writer, text and reader, the author and death, believed that ‘bio-graphy’, or life-writing, was as slippery and fluid a concept as identity itself.
