Biographical criticism
Biographical criticism is a form of literary criticism which analyzes a writer's biography to show the relationship between the author's life and their works of literature.[2] Biographical criticism is often associated with historical-biographical criticism,[3] a critical method that "sees a literary work chiefly, if not exclusively, as a reflection of its author's life and times".[4]
This longstanding critical method dates back at least to the
Like any critical methodology, biographical criticism can be used with discretion and insight or employed as a superficial shortcut to understanding the literary work on its own terms through such strategies as
to describe criticism that neglected the imaginative genesis of literature.Notwithstanding this critique, biographical criticism remained a significant mode of literary inquiry throughout the 20th century, particularly in studies of Charles Dickens and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. The method continues to be employed in the study of such authors as John Steinbeck,[2] Walt Whitman[3] and William Shakespeare.[9]
Peripatetic biographical criticism
In The Cambridge history of literary criticism: Classical criticism, in a chapter titled "Peripatetic Biographical Criticism", George Alexander Kennedy notes that in the
Recognition of otherness
Jackson J. Benson describes the form as a "'recognition of 'otherness'—that there is an author who is different in personality and background from the reader—appears to be a simple-minded proposition. Yet as a basic prerequisite to the understanding and evaluation of a literary text it is often ignored even by the most sophisticated literary critics. The exploration of otherness is what
Connections to other modes of criticism
Biographical criticism shares in common with
Assessments of biographical criticism and literary biography
In The Art of Literary Biography (1995), John Worthen writes:
'The fact that we want an emergent sense of the inevitable development suggests the enormously soothing quality which biographies have come to have in our age. Not only do biographies suggest that things as difficult as human lives can – for all their obvious complexity – be summed up, known, comprehended: they reassure us that, while we are reading, a world will be created in which there are few or no unclear motives, muddled decisions, or (indeed) loose ends.'[11]
See also
References
- ^ "Criticism".
- ^ JSTOR 25111810.
- ^ Project MUSE 39025.
- ^ Wilfred L. Guerin, A handbook of critical approaches to literature, Edition 5, 2005, page 51, 57-61; Oxford University Press, University of Michigan
- JSTOR 4171815.
- ^ http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/criticism "Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1779–81) was the first thorough-going exercise in biographical criticism, the attempt to relate a writer's background and life to his works."
- OCLC 390148
- OCLC 560970612
- ^ Schiffer, James (ed), Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays (1999),pp. 19-27, 40-43, 45, 47, 395
- ^ George Alexander Kennedy, The Cambridge history of literary criticism: Classical criticism, page 205, Cambridge University Press, 1989
- ^ John Worthen, 'The Necessary Ignorance of a Biographer,' in John Batchelor (ed.) The Art of Literary Biography, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1995 pp.227-244, p.231
External links
- SEGRILLO, Angelo. Confessions of a Biographer: Reflections upon the Theory of Biography. LEA Working Paper Series, no. 5, March 2019