Abstract
‘The Life and Works of…’ — this comfortable apposition is a formula often used by literary biographers in the titles of their books but, while the conjunction that links the actual life of the subject with the fictions of his or her imagination can be seen as mere descriptive convenience, it glosses over the ambiguous status of novels, poems and plays as sources of information about an author’s life. What follows attempts to explicate the ambiguity of this conjunctive ‘and’, exploring the different ways in which the recreation and understanding of a literary life may be seen reflected in the subject’s works and, by implication, the contribution that biography can make to literary knowledge and appreciation.
Literary biographers usually try not to split the performing, public, everyday self off from the private writing self, but to work out the connection between them. That is really the whole point of literary biography.
(Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction, 2009)1
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Notes and Reference
Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2009), 102.
Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1961), 137–8. See also Chapter 4, notes 5 & 6.
Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (Penguin, 1991).
Park Honan, Authors’ Lives: On Literary Biography the Arts of Language (St. Martin’s Press-now Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), 14.
Carol Shields, Jane Austen (Phoenix, 2001), 4.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin, 1916/1960), 215.
Michael Benton, Literary Biography: An Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 67–75.
See also, Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (Penguin, 2009);
and James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (Faber, 2010).
See, A. Fleishman, Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England (University of California Press, 1983).
Charles Nicholl, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (Penguin, 2008).
William Hazlitt (1821), cited in Colin Burrow (ed.), The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford University Press, 2002), 138.
A. L. Rowse, Shakespeare the Man (Book Club Associates & Macmillan, 1973);
Michael Wood, In Search of Shakespeare (BBC Books, 2003);
and, Rene Weiss, Shakespeare Revealed (John Murray, 2007).
Stanley Wells, Shakespeare: A Life in Drama (W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), 15–17.
Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford University Press, 1999), 185.
Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (Picador, 1997), 53. Jonathan Bate, op. cit., 2009: 209–214.
Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford University Press, 1993), 33–4.
A summary of the range and diversity of views is given in David Bevington, Shakespeare and Biography (Oxford University Press, 2010), 43–51.
Duncan Wu, Wordsworth: An Inner Life (Blackwell, 2004), 122–3.
Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford University Press, 1990), 7.
Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’ in Modern Languages Notes (1997), 94: 920.
Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth (Pimlico, 2000);
and Juliet Barker, Wordsworth: A Life (Viking, 2000).
Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (Faber, 2009), 126.
Robert Gittings, Thomas Hardy (Penguin, 2001), 15.
Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (Viking, 2006), 337.
Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw (Vintage, 1997), 370.
Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (Picador, 2009), xvii.
William Boyd, ‘The French Effect’ in Times Literary Supplement, 8 October 2010: 3.
V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (Picador, 1987/2002), 159.
V. S. Naipaul, Guerrillas (Vintage, 1980), 17.
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Benton, M. (2015). The Author’s Works (1): Signs of Life?. In: Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137549587_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137549587_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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