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基本説明
Why biography? Lives of writers, thinkers and artists, while unfailingly popular with readers, raise all kinds of theoretical problems. This volume explores the different faces and functions of the genre in a range of European settings from antiquity to the present.
Full Description
Why biography? This collection of essays on the problems and functions of biography, and particularly the biography of writers, thinkers and artists, investigates a subject of enduring importance for those interested in culture and society. In the last century, it has been a controversial subject, as old models of biographical writing were attacked and superseded, while critics and theorists questioned the once self-evident value of the biography of writers. Yet the genre continues to attract notable authors and is unfailingly popular with readers. The present volume, while containing essays by practising biographers, is intended primarily as a stimulus to critical thinking. It focuses on the diverse functions assumed by life-writing in different European countries at different periods, challenging both the notion of a genre with constant characteristics and aims and the view of modern biography as the happy culmination of centuries of progress.
Contents
Richard Holmes: The Proper Study?; Kay Ferres: Gender, Biography, and the Public Sphere; Sergei Averintsev: ; From Biography to Hagiography: Some Stable Patterns in the Greek and Latin Tradition of Lives, including Lives of the Saints; Martin McLaughlin: ; Biography and Autobiography in the Italian Renaissance; Ian Donaldson: National Biography and the Arts of Memory: From Thomas Fuller to Colin Matthew; Peter France: ; From Eulogy to Biography: The French Academic Eloge; Roger Paulin: Adding Stones to the Edifice: Patterns of German Biography; Elinor Shaffer: ; Shaping Victorian Biography: From Anecdote to Bildungsroman; Ann Jefferson: Sainte-Beuve: Biography, Criticism and the Literary; Avril Pyman: Yury Tynyanov and the 'Literary Fact'; Malcolm Bowie: Freud and the Art of Biography; Laura Marcus: The Newness of the 'New Biography': Biographical Theory and Practice in the Early Twentieth Century; William St Clair: The Biographer as Archaeologist; Mark Kinkead-Weekes: Writing Lives Forwards: A Case for Strictly Chronological Biography; Miranda Seymour: Shaping the Truth; Christina Howells: Sartre's Existential Biographies: A Search for a Method; Ian Christie: A Life on Film; James Walter: 'The Solace of Doubt?' Biographical Methodology after the Short Twentieth Century.
