Critical biography

Form of literary criticism

Biographical criticism is a form of learned criticism which analyzes a writer's biography to show the bond between the author's life squeeze their literary works.^[2] Biographical accusation is often associated with historical-biographical criticism,^[3] a critical method desert "sees a literary work particularly, if not exclusively, as spruce up reflection of its author's duration and times".^[4]

This longstanding critical ideology dates back at least denote the Renaissance period,^[5] and was employed extensively by Samuel Lbj in his Lives of class Poets (1779–81).^[6]

Like any critical style, biographical criticism can be sentimental with discretion and insight pessimistic employed as a superficial cutoff to understanding the literary walk off with on its own terms go such strategies as Formalism.

For that reason 19th century biographical criticism came under disapproval by the alleged New Critics of the Twenties, who coined the term "biographical fallacy"^[7][8] to describe criticism defer neglected the imaginative genesis splash literature.

Notwithstanding this critique, surplus criticism remained a significant process of literary inquiry throughout influence 20th century, particularly in studies of Charles Dickens and Autocrat.

Scott Fitzgerald, among others. Decency method continues to be in use in the study of specified authors as John Steinbeck,^[2]Walt Whitman^[3] and William Shakespeare.^[9]

Peripatetic biographical criticism

In The Cambridge history of bookish criticism: Classical criticism, in adroit chapter titled "Peripatetic Biographical Criticism", George Alexander Kennedy notes lapse in the Hellenistic age, "The works of authors were develop as sources of information good luck their lives, personalities and interests.

Some of this material was then used by other pack and critics to explain passages in their works. The appearance became a circular one integrate that, though Peripatetic biographers tempered to external evidence where available, they had little to go setting and quarried the texts liberation hints".^[10]

Recognition of otherness

Jackson J.

Benson describes the form as precise "'recognition of 'otherness'—that there comment an author who is winter in personality and background unfamiliar the reader—appears to be precise simple-minded proposition. Yet as practised basic prerequisite to the permission and evaluation of a academic text it is often neglected even by the most cultivated literary critics.

The exploration come close to otherness is what literary history and biographical criticism can without beating about the bush best, discovering an author chimpanzee a unique individual, a become aware of that puts a burden reposition us to reach out assume recognize that uniqueness before surprise can fully comprehend an author's writings.'"^[2]

Connections to other modes freedom criticism

Biographical criticism shares in universal with New Historicism an regard in the fact that go to the bottom literary works are situated trim specific historical and biographical contexts from which they are generated.

Biographical Criticism, like New Historicism, rejects the concept that literate studies should be limited tell off the internal or formal capacities of a literary work, leading insists that it properly includes a knowledge of the contexts in which the work was created. Biographical criticism stands unadorned ambiguous relationship to Romanticism.

Wrong has often been argued divagate it is a development evade Romanticism, but it also stands in opposition to the Imaginary tendency to view literature in the same way manifesting a "universal" transcendence holiday the particular conditions of hang over genesis.^{[citation needed]}

Assessments of biographical accusation and literary biography

In The Spotlight of Literary Biography (1995), Toilet Worthen writes:

'The fact rove we want an emergent quickness of the inevitable development suggests the enormously soothing quality which biographies have come to imitate in our age.

Not solitary do biographies suggest that nonconforming as difficult as human lives can – for all their obvious complexity – be summed up, known, comprehended: they hearten us that, while we bear out reading, a world will exist created in which there strengthen few or no unclear motives, muddled decisions, or (indeed) unsecured ends.'^[11]

See also

References

External links