Description
Book SynopsisLiterary Biography: An Introduction illustrates and accounts for the literary genre that merges historical facts with the conventions of narrative while revealing how the biographical context can enrich the study of canonical authors.
- Provides up-to-date and comprehensive coverage of issues and controversies in life writing, a rapidly growing field of study
- Offers a valuable biographical and historical context for the study of major classic and contemporary authors
- Features an interview with Wilfred Owen''s biographer, Dominic Hibberd; a gallery of literary portraits with commentaries; close readings that illustrate the differences between fiction and biography; speculation about likely future developments; and detailed suggestions for further reading
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations xi
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction xiii
1 Literary Biography Now and Then 1
The Cinderella of Literary Studies 1
The Rise and Rise of Literary Biography 4
Dr Johnson: Biographer, Theorist and Subject 7
Virginia Woolf: Time, Memory and Identity 12
2 Life [Hi]Stories: Telling Tales 18
Aspects of Narrative 18
(i) Beginnings: Charlotte Brontë 19
(ii) Middles: Thomas Hardy 21
(iii) Endings: Jane Austen 25
The Naked Biographer 28
Inventing the Truth 30
3 Reading Biography 35
Biographer, Biography and the Reader 35
Imagining Blake 38
Problems of a Hybrid Form 42
Reading Lessons 45
4 Literary Biomythography 47
Biomythography 47
Myth-Making: The Brontë Paradigm 48
(i) Facts: Selection and ‘Spin’ 49
(ii) Fact into Fiction 50
(iii) Fiction into Myth 50
(iv) Myth into ‘Faction’ 51
(v) Demythologising the Brontës 52
Variations on the Theme 53
(i) Byron 54
(ii) Dickens 55
(iii) Sylvia Plath 58
Conclusions 63
5 Inferential Biography: Shakespeare the Invisible Man 67
Virtual Shakespeares 68
(i) The Facts 68
(ii) The Theatrical Context 69
(iii) The Social Context 71
(iv) The Shakespeare Mythos 72
(v) The Shakespeare Canon 73
The Implied Author: Inferential Biography 74
(i) The Art of Love: The Sonnets 75
(ii) Prejudice, Discrimination and the Law: The Merchant of Venice 77
(iii) War and the Politics of Nationhood: Henry V 79
(iv) Language and Thinking: Hamlet 82
(v) Art and Artifice: The Tempest 85
The Limits of Imagination 87
6 Literary Biography and Portraiture 92
Sister Arts 92
(i) Biography and Portraiture: Reynolds’s Portrait of Dr Johnson 94
(ii) Reading the Image: Cassandra Austen’s Sketch of Jane Austen 96
(iii) Visual Myth-Making: Henry Weekes’s Shelley Monument 98
(iv) Celebrity Image: Thomas Phillips’s Portrait of Byron in Albanian Dress 100
(v) Visual Memoir: Joseph Severn’s Portrait of John Keats 102
(vi) Bardography: The Chandos Portrait of Shakespeare 104
(vii) The Inner Life: R. W. Buss’s Dickens’s Dream 106
(viii) Sisters’ Arts: Vanessa Bell’s Portrait of Virginia Woolf 108
(ix) ‘To prepare a face …’: Patrick Heron’s Portrait of T. S. Eliot 110
(x) Branwell’s Ghost: Branwell Brontë’s Portrait of his Three Sisters 112
Art to Order 114
7 Comparative Biography: Dickens’s ‘Lives’ 117
The Victorian Dickens 118
The Modern Dickens 121
The Post-Modern Dickens 125
Lives and Times 130
8 Literary Auto/Biography 132
Acts of Self-Creation in Wordsworth and Joyce 132
Wordsworth’s ‘biographic verse’ 134
Joyce’s ‘artist, like the God of creation’ 143
Masks and Metaphors 149
9 Biography in Practice 152
An Interview with Dominic Hibberd, author of Wilfred Owen: A New Biography 152
Living with the Subject 153
Imagining Wilfred 157
Matters of Life and Death 166
10 Authorised Lives 171
The Life of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry 172
Bernard Shaw by Michael Holroyd 176
T. S. Eliot by Peter Ackroyd 181
Orwell: The Life by D. J. Taylor 186
Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life by Andrew Motion 192
Contemporary Lives 199
11 Literary Lives: Scenes and Stories 202
Dinner with Dr Johnson and John Wilkes 203
Dinner with Mrs Ramsay 208
Biography and Fiction 215
12 Biography and the Future 218
Select Bibliography 225
Further Reading 225
General Bibliography 229
Index 239
