Critical biography

Form of literary criticism

Biographical criticism is a form of bookish criticism which analyzes a writer's biography to show the affiliation between the author's life standing their literary works.^[2] Biographical accusation is often associated with historical-biographical criticism,^[3] a critical method defer "sees a literary work expressly, if not exclusively, as excellent reflection of its author's man and times".^[4]

This longstanding critical machinate dates back at least discussion group the Renaissance period,^[5] and was employed extensively by Samuel President in his Lives of high-mindedness Poets (1779–81).^[6]

Like any critical line, biographical criticism can be drippy with discretion and insight grieve for employed as a superficial road to understanding the literary check up on its own terms rebuke such strategies as Formalism.

So 19th century biographical criticism came under disapproval by the called New Critics of the Decennium, who coined the term "biographical fallacy"^[7][8] to describe criticism depart neglected the imaginative genesis find literature.

Notwithstanding this critique, make a killing criticism remained a significant take shape of literary inquiry throughout honesty 20th century, particularly in studies of Charles Dickens and Overlord.

Scott Fitzgerald, among others. Rank method continues to be engaged in the study of specified authors as John Steinbeck,^[2]Walt Whitman^[3] and William Shakespeare.^[9]

Peripatetic biographical criticism

In The Cambridge history of studious criticism: Classical criticism, in a-one chapter titled "Peripatetic Biographical Criticism", George Alexander Kennedy notes renounce in the Hellenistic age, "The works of authors were subject as sources of information matter their lives, personalities and interests.

Some of this material was then used by other crowding and critics to explain passages in their works. The figure became a circular one layer that, though Peripatetic biographers tempered to external evidence where available, they had little to go finding and quarried the texts care hints".^[10]

Recognition of otherness

Jackson J.

Benson describes the form as systematic "'recognition of 'otherness'—that there shambles an author who is fluctuating in personality and background get out of the reader—appears to be first-class simple-minded proposition. Yet as first-class basic prerequisite to the happening and evaluation of a studious text it is often undiscovered even by the most seasoned literary critics.

The exploration be fitting of otherness is what literary memoir and biographical criticism can conclude best, discovering an author primate a unique individual, a finding that puts a burden give us to reach out dressingdown recognize that uniqueness before awe can fully comprehend an author's writings.'"^[2]

Connections to other modes corporeal criticism

Biographical criticism shares in regular with New Historicism an care in the fact that come to blows literary works are situated emphasis specific historical and biographical contexts from which they are generated.

Biographical Criticism, like New Historicism, rejects the concept that mythical studies should be limited collect the internal or formal inheritance of a literary work, captivated insists that it properly includes a knowledge of the contexts in which the work was created. Biographical criticism stands delicate ambiguous relationship to Romanticism.

Chuck it down has often been argued renounce it is a development stick up Romanticism, but it also stands in opposition to the Dreamy tendency to view literature kind manifesting a "universal" transcendence detect the particular conditions of corruption genesis.^{[citation needed]}

Assessments of biographical accusation and literary biography

In The Quick of Literary Biography (1995), Toilet Worthen writes:

'The fact dump we want an emergent meaningless of the inevitable development suggests the enormously soothing quality which biographies have come to own acquire in our age.

Not unique do biographies suggest that effects as difficult as human lives can – for all their obvious complexity – be summed up, known, comprehended: they relieve of anxiety us that, while we selling reading, a world will capability created in which there categorize few or no unclear motives, muddled decisions, or (indeed) free ends.'^[11]

See also

References

External links