Rövid leírás:
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.
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Hosszú leírás:
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 In the last century, it has been a controversial subject, as old models of biographical writing were attacked and superseded, while critics and theorists questioned the once self-evident value of the biography of writers.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.
Review from previous edition Absorbing and informative
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Tartalomjegyzék:
The Proper Study?
Gender, Biography, and the Public Sphere
From Biography to Hagiography: Some Stable Patterns in the Greek and Latin Tradition of Lives, including Lives of the Saints
Biography and Autobiography in the Italian Renaissance
National Biography and the Arts of Memory: From Thomas Fuller to Colin Matthew
From Eulogy to Biography: The French Academic Eloge
Adding Stones to the Edifice: Patterns of German Biography
Shaping Victorian Biography: From Anecdote to Bildungsroman
Sainte-Beuve: Biography, Criticism and the Literary
Yury Tynyanov and the ‘Literary Fact’
Freud and the Art of Biography
The Newness of the ‘New Biography’: Biographical Theory and Practice in the Early Twentieth Century
The Biographer as Archaeologist
Writing Lives Forwards: A Case for Strictly Chronological Biography
Shaping the Truth
Sartre’s Existential Biographies: A Search for a Method
A Life on Film
‘The Solace of Doubt’? Biographical Methodology after the Short Twentieth Century
