Literary 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 Content
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Literary Biography Now and Then
The Cinderella of Literary Studies
The Rise and Rise of Literary Biography
Dr Johnson: Biographer, Theorist and Subject
Virginia Woolf: Time, Memory and Identity
2. Life [Hi]Stories: Telling Tales
Aspects of Narrative
(i) Beginnings: Charlotte Brontë
(ii) Middles: Thomas Hardy
(iii) Endings: Jane Austen
The Naked Biographer
Inventing the Truth
3. Reading Biography
Biographer, Biography and the Reader
Imagining Blake
Problems of a Hybrid Form
Reading Lessons
4. Literary Biomythography
Biomythography
Myth-Making: The Brontë Paradigm
(i) Facts: Selection and ‘Spin’
(ii) Fact into Fiction
(iii) Fiction into Myth
(iv) Myth into ‘Faction’
(v) Demythologising the Brontës
Variations on the Theme
(i) Byron
(ii) Dickens
(iii) Sylvia Plath
Conclusions
5. Inferential Biography: Shakespeare the Invisible Man
Virtual Shakespeares
(i) The Facts
(ii) The Theatrical Context
(iii) The Social Context
(iv) The Shakespeare Mythos
(v) The Shakespeare Canon
The Implied Author: Inferential Biography
(i) The Art of Love: The Sonnets
(ii) Prejudice, Discrimination and the Law: The Merchant of Venice
(iii) War and the Politics of Nationhood: Henry V
(iv) Language and Thinking: Hamlet
(v) Art and Artifice: The Tempest
The Limits of Imagination
6. Literary Biography and Portraiture
Sister Arts
(i) Biography and Portraiture: Reynolds’s Portrait of Dr Johnson
(ii) Reading the Image: Cassandra Austen’s Sketch of Jane Austen
(iii) Visual Myth-Making: Henry Weekes’s Shelley Monument
(iv) Celebrity Image: Thomas Phillips’s Portrait of Byronin Albanian Dress
(v) Visual Memoir: Joseph Severn’s Portrait of John Keats
(vi) Bardography: The Chandos Portrait of Shakespeare
(vii) The Inner Life: R. W. Buss’s Dickens’s Dream
(viii) Sisters’ Arts: Vanessa Bell’s Portrait of Virginia Woolf
(ix) ‘To prepare a face …’: Patrick Heron’s Portrait of T. S. Eliot
(x) Branwell’s Ghost: Branwell Brontë’s Portrait of his Three Sisters
Art to Order
7. Comparative Biography: Dickens’s’Lives’
The Victorian Dickens
The Modern Dickens
The Post-Modern Dickens
Lives and Times
8. Literary Auto/Biography
Acts of Self-Creation in Wordsworth and Joyce
Wordsworth’s ‘biographic verse’
Joyce’s ‘artist, like the God of creation’
Masks and Metaphors
9. Biography in Practice
An Interview with Dominic Hibberd, author of Wilfred Owen: A New Biography
Living with the Subject
Imagining Wilfred
Matters of Life and Death
10. Authorised Lives
The Life of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry
Bernard Shaw by Michael Holroyd
T. S. Eliot by Peter Ackroyd
Orwell: The Life by D. J. Taylor
Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life by Andrew Motion
Contemporary Lives
11. Literary Lives: Scenes and Stories
Dinner with Dr Johnson and John Wilkes
Dinner with Mrs Ramsay
Biography and Fiction
12. Biography and the Future
Select Bibliography
Further Reading
General Bibliography
Index
About the author
Michael Benton is Emeritus Professor of Education at
the University of Southampton. His publications include the highly
influential Teaching Literature 9-14 (with Geoff Fox,
1985) and several widely used anthologies of poetry, most notably
the Touchstones series (with Peter Benton,
various editions 1968-2008). His most recent book was
Studies in the Spectator Role: Literature, Painting and
Pedagogy (2000).
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