Biography: The Facts

Main blurb (for internal use only – CHECK BEFORE USING IN PRINTED PUBLICITY):As the annotated chapter headings below show, the proposal is to explore the origins and development of the genre, closing in the last two chapters with current controversies. These centre round struggles to face those who are ′against biography′ and to present biography as not just a respectable but an important, and finally a theorised subject of academic literary study.1. THE BIOGRAPHY CHANNELWhy do we like biography so much? Account for the current popularity of biography (see "the biography channel" on American television); our need for role models, our longing to see inside people′s private lives, our mixture of prurience and puritanism, sensation–seeking and quickness to judge. Whose lives do we want? Why do certain histories and certain periods (Bloomsbury, for instance) arouse so much fascination and so much dislike? What does the "biography boom" say about the way we live now?2. SAINTS AND SINNERSHow does biography come into being? The roots and traditions of Western biography; its foundation in hagiography and exemplary lives. The interruption of that tradition with Johnsonian truthfulness and Boswellian fidelity and anecdotalism. The settling into modes of public acceptability, praise, celebration, censorship, and the division of public and private in Victorian lives. The masculine comradeship exemplified in many of these lives.3. FEET OF CLAYThe coming apart of the Victorian model of biography with the late 19th century scandals of Froude and Carlyle, Brown′s life of Symonds, and Strachey′s Eminent Victorians. Satire, debunking, miniaturism and impressionism as reactions against the Victorian monuments. Woolf′s Orlando as a fantasy–parody of conventional biography; her troubled, radical writings on biography.4. THE GOLDEN AGEHow British biography was refurbished and transformed by the big biographies, starting in the 60s, of Holroyd, Glendinning, Holmes, Spurling, Motion, how do we define these freelance biographers, what techniques used, why so successful? What relation to biographical traditions of the past? How do they use evidence and what styles do they use; how do their biographies relate to fiction?5. OBSCURE LIVESHow the angle in biography keeps recurrently shifting away or aside from major figures, heroes and heroines; how biography can attend to minor characters, low–status figures, walk–on parts, characters who do not think their own lives worth writing, groups rather than individuals, servants rather than masters. What do such lives tell us about the politics and social class of biography?6. WRITING A WOMAN′S LIFEHow have women′s biographies differed from men; have women′s lives required a different kind of approach, and is that still the case? Do women biographers (Elizabeth Gaskell on Charlotte Bronte, for instance) pay attention to different aspects of a life? What does feminist biography need to incorporate; why should biography and feminism need each other?7. DEATHBEDSHow do lives finish? Why do we want to give meaning to deaths? Why do we need endings? How can the death of a subject be interpreted? Where should it be placed in the life–story? What follows death in a biography? This meditation on biography and death is a way of considering what biographical practises have to tell us about the way we think about the shape of a life and what we desire from biography.8. AGAINST BIOGRAPHYWhy have so many novelists and poets written against biographers, from Edith Wharton and James Joyce to Philip Larkin and Julian Barnes? What is the threat biography poses to the creative writer? Why does biography have a bad name? And why should so many biographers currently be jumping ship and protesting against the limitation and falsifications of the genre?9. EXAMINED LIVESBiography has until recently been relatively untheorised, unlike autobiography, and has remained outside the academy. This is beginning to change, and more theoretical/analytical books about biography are beginning to be written; biography is becoming a more selfconscious art, and is finding its way onto academic courses. Why should this be happening now, and what does it mean for the future of biography?