The volume reflects the history of modern biography since Johann Gottfried Herder. The historical status and methodology of significant paradigm-forming biographies are systematically examined. The processes deployed here are principally those of hermeneutics, ideology critique and narratology.
Together with the volume Die Biographie - Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie [Towards a Theory of Biography], this work is published on behalf of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography in Vienna.