ABSTRACT
Biography and autobiography are flourishing as never before. Biography in particular is a genre that sells, especially in the UK, and one which supports professional practitioners and which offers academics in the humanities the relatively unusual prospect of producing work that is widely read. At least that is broadly speaking the state of affairs in the English-speaking world and in Northern Europe as a whole. Italy is somewhat different. Autobiography and biography have not enjoyed the same widespread success within Italian literary culture or given rise to such theoretical questioning. Robert Gordon examines the contrasting approaches of the two biographers, each working with the conventions of a different narrative genre, and sets them in the developing, self-aware practice of modern biography. Giuliana Pieri moves beyond Nencioni's biographers' hyperboles to uncover a writer who found in the genre of biography a medium that blended his own aesthetic and ethical ideals.
