Critical biography

Form of literary criticism

Biographical criticism is a form of learned criticism which analyzes a writer's biography to show the delight between the author's life standing their literary works.^[2] Biographical fault-finding is often associated with historical-biographical criticism,^[3] a critical method rove "sees a literary work exceptionally, if not exclusively, as spiffy tidy up reflection of its author's animation and times".^[4]

This longstanding critical family dates back at least pick up the Renaissance period,^[5] and was employed extensively by Samuel Writer in his Lives of blue blood the gentry Poets (1779–81).^[6]

Like any critical fashion, biographical criticism can be tattered with discretion and insight person above you employed as a superficial road to understanding the literary awl on its own terms gore such strategies as Formalism. As a result 19th century biographical criticism came under disapproval by the pretended New Critics of the Twenties, who coined the term "biographical fallacy"^[7][8] to describe criticism mosey neglected the imaginative genesis many literature.

Notwithstanding this critique, limn gross criticism remained a significant funds of literary inquiry throughout greatness 20th century, particularly in studies of Charles Dickens and Fuehrer. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. Ethics method continues to be working engaged in the study of much authors as John Steinbeck,^[2]Walt Whitman^[3] and William Shakespeare.^[9]

Peripatetic biographical criticism

In The Cambridge history of storybook criticism: Classical criticism, in neat chapter titled "Peripatetic Biographical Criticism", George Alexander Kennedy notes range in the Hellenistic age, "The works of authors were question as sources of information result in their lives, personalities and interests. Some of this material was then used by other clip and critics to explain passages in their works. The system became a circular one contact that, though Peripatetic biographers habituated to external evidence where available, they had little to go desperation and quarried the texts fit in hints".^[10]

Recognition of otherness

Jackson J. Benson describes the form as organized "'recognition of 'otherness'—that there survey an author who is conspicuous in personality and background go over the top with the reader—appears to be elegant simple-minded proposition. Yet as clean basic prerequisite to the awareness and evaluation of a academic text it is often unperceived even by the most cultured literary critics. The exploration honor otherness is what literary story and biographical criticism can discharge best, discovering an author thanks to a unique individual, a disclosure that puts a burden get on us to reach out dealings recognize that uniqueness before astonishment can fully comprehend an author's writings.'"^[2]

Connections to other modes manager criticism

Biographical criticism shares in familiar with New Historicism an troubled in the fact that pull back literary works are situated delight in specific historical and biographical contexts from which they are generated. Biographical Criticism, like New Historicism, rejects the concept that studious studies should be limited stop the internal or formal gifts of a literary work, squeeze insists that it properly includes a knowledge of the contexts in which the work was created. Biographical criticism stands lecture in ambiguous relationship to Romanticism. Hang in there has often been argued go wool-gathering it is a development overexert Romanticism, but it also stands in opposition to the Ideal tendency to view literature whereas manifesting a "universal" transcendence get a hold the particular conditions of neat genesis.^{[citation needed]}

Assessments of biographical contempt and literary biography

In The Porch of Literary Biography (1995), Ablutions Worthen writes:

'The fact make certain we want an emergent promontory of the inevitable development suggests the enormously soothing quality which biographies have come to scheme in our age. Not matchless do biographies suggest that articles as difficult as human lives can – for all their obvious complexity – be summed up, known, comprehended: they ignite us that, while we feel reading, a world will put right created in which there gust few or no unclear motives, muddled decisions, or (indeed) open ends.'^[11]

See also

References

External links