A Companion to Literary BiographyRichard Bradford An authoritative review of literary biography covering the seventeenth century to the twentieth century A Companion to Literary Biography offers a comprehensive account of literary biography spanning the history of the genre across three centuries. The editor – an esteemed literary biographer and noted expert in the field – has encouraged contributors to explore the theoretical and methodological questions raised by the writing of biographies of writers. The text examines how biographers have dealt with the lives of classic authors from Chaucer to contemporary figures such as Kingsley Amis. The Companion brings a new perspective on how literary biography enables the reader to deal with the relationship between the writer and their work. Literary biography is the most popular form of writing about writing, yet it has been largely neglected in the academic community. This volume bridges the gap between literary biography as a popular genre and its relevance for the academic study of literature. This important work:
Written for students at the undergraduate level, through postgraduate and doctoral levels, as well as academics, A Companion to Literary Biography illustrates and accounts for the importance of the literary biography as a vital element of criticism and as an index to our perception of literary history. |
Contents
Modernist Caricatures | |
Ethics and Literary Biography | |
Concerns about Facts and Form in Literary Biography | |
Feminism and Biography | |
The Role of Diaries in the Development of Literary Biography | |
Relationship | |
Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark | |
Chaucer | |
Writing Shakespeares Life | |
John Donne | |
Jonathan Swift | |
Life and Death in the Literary Biographies of Pope and His Circle | |
Richardson and Fielding | |
Literary Biography Literary Autobiography | |
The Archival Legacies of Canadian | |
Literary Biography | |
J M Coetzee and the Ethics of Style in Autobiography | |
Richmal Crompton and Others | |
the Postmodern Memoir | |
The Materials of Literary Biography | |
Renaissance Playwrights | |
Obfuscation and Invention | |
Dickens Tennyson Kipling | |
Would the Real Mr Eliot Please Stand | |
Literary Biography and the DeCanonization of Amy Lowell | |
Reviewing the Lives and Works of Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis | |
Friendship | |