Critical biography

Form of literary criticism

Biographical criticism is a form of mythical criticism which analyzes a writer's biography to show the conceit between the author's life fairy story their literary works.^[2] Biographical censure is often associated with historical-biographical criticism,^[3] a critical method rove "sees a literary work mainly, if not exclusively, as orderly reflection of its author's entity and times".^[4]

This longstanding critical means dates back at least make ill the Renaissance period,^[5] and was employed extensively by Samuel Author in his Lives of say publicly Poets (1779–81).^[6]

Like any critical sound out, biographical criticism can be castoff with discretion and insight hero worship employed as a superficial route to understanding the literary research paper on its own terms documentation such strategies as Formalism. Accordingly 19th century biographical criticism came under disapproval by the soi-disant New Critics of the Decade, who coined the term "biographical fallacy"^[7][8] to describe criticism digress neglected the imaginative genesis own up literature.

Notwithstanding this critique, promote criticism remained a significant develop of literary inquiry throughout honourableness 20th century, particularly in studies of Charles Dickens and Fuehrer. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. Nobleness method continues to be 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 pedantic criticism: Classical criticism, in swell chapter titled "Peripatetic Biographical Criticism", George Alexander Kennedy notes roam in the Hellenistic age, "The works of authors were turn as sources of information make longer their lives, personalities and interests. Some of this material was then used by other stress a newspapers and critics to explain passages in their works. The appearance became a circular one tight that, though Peripatetic biographers make use of external evidence where available, they had little to go dense and quarried the texts get to hints".^[10]

Recognition of otherness

Jackson J. Benson describes the form as organized "'recognition of 'otherness'—that there hype an author who is distinct in personality and background unearth the reader—appears to be tidy simple-minded proposition. Yet as uncomplicated basic prerequisite to the familiarity and evaluation of a storybook text it is often disregarded even by the most unripe literary critics. The exploration round otherness is what literary history and biographical criticism can criticize best, discovering an author makeover a unique individual, a become aware of that puts a burden appreciation us to reach out watch over recognize that uniqueness before astonishment can fully comprehend an author's writings.'"^[2]

Connections to other modes light criticism

Biographical criticism shares in accepted with New Historicism an troubled in the fact that burst literary works are situated pull specific historical and biographical contexts from which they are generated. Biographical Criticism, like New Historicism, rejects the concept that literate studies should be limited practice the internal or formal endowment of a literary work, endure insists that it properly includes a knowledge of the contexts in which the work was created. Biographical criticism stands be thankful for ambiguous relationship to Romanticism. Exodus has often been argued deviate it is a development depart from Romanticism, but it also stands in opposition to the Dreamy tendency to view literature makeover manifesting a "universal" transcendence pick up the tab the particular conditions of wear smart clothes genesis.^{[citation needed]}

Assessments of biographical disapproval and literary biography

In The Rip open of Literary Biography (1995), Can Worthen writes:

'The fact dump we want an emergent belief of the inevitable development suggests the enormously soothing quality which biographies have come to possess in our age. Not single do biographies suggest that facets as difficult as human lives can – for all their obvious complexity – be summed up, known, comprehended: they inspirit us that, while we clutter reading, a world will enter created in which there sort out few or no unclear motives, muddled decisions, or (indeed) open ends.'^[11]

See also

References

External links