In this book leading literary scholars, cultural critics, and historians of ideas and visual media, currently engaged both with early modern and contemporary conceptions of biography, reflect on the problems of writing lives from the various perspectives of their own research and in the form of case studies informed by new questions. Steven Zwicker and Kevin Sharpe have collaborated in editing several interdisciplinary collections. On the evidence from this one alone, it looks like quite a successful partnership. Writing Lives is designed to rethink biography from a number of different angles. The focus is not simply on biography, but rather on all aspects of the way in which 'lives' were written and read in the early modern period and could be understood in retrospect, as well as the ways in which we might conceive of 'lives' today and the particular problems inherent in writing and understanding such 'lives'.