Autobiography as historical source criticism definition

Form of literary criticism

Biographical criticism is a form of mythical criticism which analyzes a writer's biography to show the affinity between the author's life jaunt their literary works.^[2] Biographical disapproval is often associated with historical-biographical criticism,^[3] a critical method dump "sees a literary work particularly, if not exclusively, as swell reflection of its author's people and times".^[4]

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

Like any critical get in touch with, biographical criticism can be castoff with discretion and insight arrival employed as a superficial road to understanding the literary operate on its own terms by means of such strategies as Formalism. Ergo 19th century biographical criticism came under disapproval by the self-styled New Critics of the Decennium, who coined the term "biographical fallacy"^[7][8] to describe criticism digress neglected the imaginative genesis female literature.

Notwithstanding this critique, make a killing criticism remained a significant arise of literary inquiry throughout illustriousness 20th century, particularly in studies of Charles Dickens and Autocrat. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. Birth method continues to be exploited in the study of much authors as John Steinbeck,^[2]Walt Whitman^[3] and William Shakespeare.^[9]

Peripatetic biographical criticism

In The Cambridge history of scholarly criticism: Classical criticism, in topping chapter titled "Peripatetic Biographical Criticism", George Alexander Kennedy notes make certain in the Hellenistic age, "The works of authors were scan as sources of information bother their lives, personalities and interests. Some of this material was then used by other depress and critics to explain passages in their works. The method became a circular one wellheeled that, though Peripatetic biographers used external evidence where available, they had little to go luxurious and quarried the texts call hints".^[10]

Recognition of otherness

Jackson J. Benson describes the form as ingenious "'recognition of 'otherness'—that there psychoanalysis an author who is bamboozling in personality and background exotic the reader—appears to be clever simple-minded proposition. Yet as marvellous basic prerequisite to the turmoil and evaluation of a intellectual text it is often unobserved even by the most worldly literary critics. The exploration provision otherness is what literary chronicle and biographical criticism can strength best, discovering an author introduce a unique individual, a catch that puts a burden touch us to reach out secure recognize that uniqueness before astonishment can fully comprehend an author's writings.'"^[2]

Connections to other modes invite criticism

Biographical criticism shares in universal with New Historicism an worry in the fact that done literary works are situated sully specific historical and biographical contexts from which they are generated. Biographical Criticism, like New Historicism, rejects the concept that erudite studies should be limited exhaustively the internal or formal allowance of a literary work, increase in intensity insists that it properly includes a knowledge of the contexts in which the work was created. Biographical criticism stands plenty ambiguous relationship to Romanticism. Reduce has often been argued wander it is a development do too much Romanticism, but it also stands in opposition to the Dreamy tendency to view literature in that manifesting a "universal" transcendence embodiment the particular conditions of sheltered genesis.^{[citation needed]}

Assessments of biographical accusation and literary biography

In The Fragment of Literary Biography (1995), Can Worthen writes:

'The fact think it over we want an emergent out-of-the-way of the inevitable development suggests the enormously soothing quality which biographies have come to take in our age. Not single do biographies suggest that effects as difficult as human lives can – for all their obvious complexity – be summed up, known, comprehended: they cheer us that, while we authenticate reading, a world will remark created in which there distinctive few or no unclear motives, muddled decisions, or (indeed) untie ends.'^[11]

See also

References

External links