Literary biography

A researched account of a writer’s life that examines how personal experience, historical circumstances, and literary work relate to one another.

Biography: A nonfiction account of a person's life based on historical evidence. Literary biography adapts this form to a writer and the meanings of their work.
Biographical method: An approach to interpreting literature through evidence about its author’s life and circumstances. It names the central interpretive move literary biography makes between life and writing.
New Criticism: A twentieth-century approach that emphasizes close reading and treats the literary work as an autonomous object. Its resistance to author-centered interpretation challenges biography’s use of life as an explanatory key.
James Boswell: A Scottish lawyer and writer best known for his biography of Samuel Johnson. His detailed records and narrative presence helped establish a durable model of literary biography.
Biographical fallacy: The mistaken assumption that a literary work can be fully explained by facts about its author's life. It marks the risk of reducing a work’s form and meaning to personal events.
Literary criticism: The analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of literary works. It supplies methods for relating a writer’s life to textual choices without treating them as identical.
Textual scholarship: The study of how texts are composed, transmitted, edited, and published. Comparing drafts and editions can reveal how a writer shaped a work over time.
Intentional fallacy: The claim that an author's intended meaning is not the proper standard for interpreting a literary work. It questions whether biographical evidence about intention can settle a work’s meaning.
The Life of Samuel Johnson: James Boswell’s 1791 biography of the English writer and critic Samuel Johnson. It is a landmark case in building a literary life from conversation, observation, and documents.
Privacy: A person's interest in controlling access to personal information and intimate life. Biographers must weigh the historical value of private records against the subject’s privacy.

Linked from 9 pages