Hilos, tramas y relatos. Aportes y retos de la biografía en la nueva historia política

Abstract

After a long period in which political history had lost its traditional hegemony in the field of historiography, the final years of the 20th century have witnessed the recovery of its prestige in the academic sphere. A recovery that has been linked to the return of the subject and the narrative to the foreground and that has led to its methodological renewal. The objective of this article is to study the role of biography in the 21st century Spanish contemporaneism, analyzing its growing popularity from a quantitative and content point of view, in order to detect its main contributions to the Spanish contemporary historiography of the two last decades, as well as its main challenges for the future. For this, the editorial and scientific production of the period, including the biographical dictionaries, will be reviewed, and the advantages and disadvantages of the genre from the scientific point of view, its themes and main characters, its absences and outstanding issues, and the methodological debates about its exercise, will be analyzed, with special attention to the academic networks that have contributed to the reflection and consolidation of the biographical approach within the discipline.