What is "metabiography"

Metabiography is the literary study of the relation of biographies to the temporal, geographical, institutional, intellectual or ideological locations of their writers (the biographers). 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. In the words of Steven Shapin, metabiography stresses “that shifting biographical traditions make one person have many lives,” none of these necessarily more real than any other, because all are “configured and reconfigured according to the sensibilities and needs of the changing cultural settings.” In this sense, metabiography expresses a belief in the observer-dependence of historical knowledge.