Cultural changes in biography: a historical approach to modernity and its crisis

This article focuses on the cultural changes of modernity that had a major impact on how the problem of biography was considered. The realist trend is emphasised, together with the whole modern narrative. It gets into the distinction between historical science and biography in the nineteenth century. It reviews the proposals that in sociology and in historiography highlighted the role of the individual during the first third of the twentieth century. It ends up with the transformations in biography during the interwar period.