Imagine visiting a bookstore in your hometown. At chains like Barnes &
Nobles in the United States, Fnac in France or Thalia in Germany one
finds well-filled shelves with biographies and autobiographies, regularly
supplemented with new publications. On the occasion of anniversaries
of birthdays or days of death, like Albert Einstein’s in 2005 or Charles
Darwin’s in 2009, a huge number of new biographies is published. Today
›biography‹ is a diversified genre, especially in regard to academic publi-
cations. In contrast to the stuffed shelves and their popularity, biography
as a method in the humanities has had a rather negative reputation. Its
low status is astonishing because no other genre is as present as bio-
graphy in diverse fields like history, sociology, cultural studies, literature
or the arts – to name only a few. Even though biographies are genuinely
appreciated by the general readership and though they are prevalent in
several academic disciplines, scholars do rarely discuss the methods or
the theory of biographical writing. Biographies are, as the British literary
scholar David Ellis sharply remarks, »lives without theory« (Ellis 2000:1).