New Biography" for a New Millennium

Adventurous, troubled, seductive, commodified, dangerous, and even cannibalistic�such is the condition of English biography as defined over the last few decades in a host of studies on the genre such as�Biography as High Adventure; The Troubled Face of Biography;�The Seductions of Biography; Lives for Sale: Biographer's Tales;�Understanding Ourselves: The Dangerous Art of Biography; and�A Higher Form of Cannibalism?�These and other texts alert us to the challenging, provocative, and diverse responses biography invokes in its contemporary practitioners, readers, critics, and theorists. In the early twentieth century, modernist writers such as Harold Nicholson, Lytton Strachey, A. J. A. Symons, and Virginia Woolf experimented with the genre, earning for it the label "the new biography." About one hundred years later, the contributors to this special issue of�a/b: Auto/Biography Studies�reflect on what is "new" in our own millennial times, exploring biography in relation to theatre, film, comics, the Internet, and archives. In this introduction I want to touch briefly on how innovative forms, theories, and practices intersect with debates that continue to pit the marketplace against the academy, and with the paradoxical perceptions that today biography is a healthy and legitimate as well as an anemic and illegitimate genre.