British Biography: A ReaderiUniverse, 2005 M07 14 - 320 páginas Biography as a literary genre is largely the product of the eighteenth century and of one seminal work, James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). Boswell's innovations revolutionized the genre and made it the target of suppression and censorship. He sought not only to memorialize a great man but also to reveal his flaws. Boswell reported long stretches of Johnson's conversation, noted his mannerisms, and in general gave an intimate picture such as no biography had ever before dared to attempt. After Boswell, there was a retreat from his bolder innovations, which amounted to self-censorship on the biographer's part. When Thomas Carlyle's biographer, James Anthony Froude, braved this trend against truth and allowed his subject's dark side to show, he was vilified in the press. The tensions between discretion and candor have endured in British biography since Froude, a point Carl Rollyson makes in the reviews of contemporary British biographers he includes in British Biography, which also contains Johnson's full-length biography of Richard Savage, excerpts from Boswell's Life of Johnson as well selections from and commentaries on Southey's biography of Nelson, Mrs. Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Bront, and the revolutionary work of Froude and Strachey. |
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... other great artists and leaders. He did not thereby destroy biography. On the contrary, individuality now became not a happy given—something onewas bornwithand developed—but what one struggledto achieve and then maintain ...
... other respected authors to supporthis views. Hewanted toimpress his contemporaries, but posterity has no need of somuch buttressing and finds it, I imagine, tedious. OccasionallyI havemodernized spelling, changing authour to author;in ...
... other human beings but also to put ourselvesin their places. Tounderstand anything about others or aboutthe worldis to feel it,Johnson suggests—or at least to imagine thatwe feel it. The distinction between actuality and imagination is ...
... other only by prudence and by virtue.” Johnson arguesfora vision of biography thattakes an intrinsic interestinthe ... others is produced by an act of the imagination, that realizes the event however fictitious, or approximates it ...
... other writings,to be found in thenarratives of the lives of particular persons; and thereforeno species ofwriting seems more worthy of cultivation than biography, since none can bemore delightful or more useful, none can more certainly ...
Contenido
READINGS THE RAMBLER NO 60 JOHNSONS LIFE OF SAVAGE 1744 | |
EXCEPT FROM ROBERT SOUTHEYS LIFE OF NELSON | |
EXCERPTS FROM ELIZABETH GASKELLS LIFEOF | |
EXCERPT FROM FROUDES LIFE OF CARLYLE | |
LYTTON STRACHEY EMINENT VICTORIANS 1918 | |
REVIEWS | |
JOHN FOWLES | |