Abstract: Comparative biography originates as a genre referring to the comparative writing of biographical subjects from different cultures and/or languages. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans marks the beginning of this genre. With the advent of the 20th century, research on life writing by means of comparison has emerged in three patterns as follows: parallel study, which compares lives in different languages and/or cultures; influence study, which traces the the influences a biography or a cultural trend in one society may have on the life writing of other languages or cultures; and subject study, which refer to the comparison of the same subject in different cultures and languages. Nowadays, a combination of these three research patterns also appears in much research.

Key words: comparative biography, comparative writing, parallel study,influence study, comparative subject study

Yang Zhengrun is Vsiting Distinguished Professor and Director of Center for Life Wring, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Vice President of China Biography Society, Director of Major Project for National Social Sciences Fund: “Compilation and Research of Overseas Life-writing on Modern Chinese People.” His major publications include Footprints of Human Nature (1991), A Concise History of Biographical Literature (1994), Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1999), Modern Poetics of Biography (2009), The Self-Portraits of Beings: A Study of Chinese Modern Biography and National Personality (2009), Dictionary of Foreign Biography: Appreciation (2009).