Book Library

Author: John Updike
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 9781570033452
Size: 63.82 MB
Format: PDF, ePub, Docs
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 43
View: 5695

Book Description: In On Literary Biography, John Updike lays out his skeptical, yet generous, reflections on reading and writing about the lives of literary figures. Asking what satisfactions literary biography may offer readers, he decides that the first and perhaps the most worthy is in allowing us to continue and expand our acquaintance with an author who interests us, so that we may partake again, from another angle, of the joys we have experienced within the author's oeuvre. He tells of finding in a biography of Proust the solid details of what he had previously encountered through that writer's subjective sensibility, but he acknowledges that there can be other reasons for attending to the genre. If the reader is also a writer, a desire to learn the details of a fellow's craft may come into play. Or in a diagnostic mood, readers may seek to relate features of a writer's achievement to the psychological and physical circumstances in which it occurred. Some of us, some of the time, may also take pleasure in seeing the human flaws of writers exposed and in watching as the literary mentality is turned to show an unsavoury side. Updike calls one variant of the biography that uncovers person

Author: Lanae H. Isaacson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781414462271
Size: 38.18 MB
Format: PDF, Docs
Category : Authors, Norwegian
Languages : en
Pages :
View: 2581

Book Description: This volume surveys Norwegian literature from the humanism of the vibrant, worldly Hanseatic city Bergen in the 16th century to the symbolism, expressionism & fin-de-siecle poetry and prose associated with Europe. Norway came into its own as a literary powerhouse in the 19th century, a period of literary ferment when most of the authors covered in the volume lived.

Author: John Batchelor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198182899
Size: 56.43 MB
Format: PDF
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289
View: 1025

Book Description: Is literary biography so widely read for popular, 'prurient' reasons, or for reputable intellectual reasons? Is it of interest only in so far as it illuminates a writer's work? How much can we know about a life, such as Shakespeare's, where the documentation is so scanty? These are amongst the wide range of questions addressed by the seventeen leading biographers and literary critics who have contributed essays to The Art of Literary Biography. Always a popular genre, biography hasbecome one of the most immediate and accessible modes of writing about literature. In this book, individual literary figures such as Conrad, Huxley, Virginia Woolf, and the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Lord Rochester are examined. Also addressed is the nature and form of literary biography - the concept of biography as autobiography, the problems the genre poses, the necessity of the ignorance of a biographer, and the literary biographer at work. Richard Holmes, Jon Stallworthy, Hermione Lee,David Bradshaw, and Ann Thwaite are amongst the distinguished contributors to this fascinating and thought-provoking book.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Size: 61.48 MB
Format: PDF, Mobi
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages :
View: 3224

Book Description:

Author: Michael Benton
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 9781444310078
Size: 57.67 MB
Format: PDF, Kindle
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280
View: 3002

Book Description: Literary Biography: An Introduction illustrates and accountsfor the literary genre that merges historical facts with theconventions of narrative while revealing how the biographicalcontext can enrich the study of canonical authors. Provides up-to-date and comprehensive coverage of issues andcontroversies in life writing, a rapidly growing field ofstudy Offers a valuable biographical and historical context for thestudy of major classic and contemporary authors Features an interview with Wilfred Owen's biographer, DominicHibberd; a gallery of literary portraits with commentaries; closereadings that illustrate the differences between fiction andbiography; speculation about likely future developments; anddetailed suggestions for further reading

Author: Leon Edel
Publisher: Bloomington : Indiana University Press
ISBN:
Size: 65.31 MB
Format: PDF, Kindle
Category : Authors
Languages : en
Pages : 170
View: 1553

Book Description:

Author: Midge Gillies
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052173231X
Size: 45.41 MB
Format: PDF, ePub, Mobi
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 128
View: 4935

Book Description: Critical introductions to a range of literary topics and genres. Writing Lives takes as its focus life writing, both autobiography and biography, discussing these genres specifically within the contexts of the lives and literary careers of writers, past and present. In addition to exploring the key characteristics of life writing, the book also examines the relationship between the lives of authors and the influence of these lives both on their own writing and on the reception of their work by contemporary and later readers. The book traces the origins of literary biography from its early roots to its position as a best-selling genre in its own right.

Author: Roger Allen
Publisher: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag
ISBN: 9783447061414
Size: 62.67 MB
Format: PDF, Kindle
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 395
View: 7091

Book Description: The essays, which discuss authors in a variety of literary genres and across the spectrum of the region concerned-from Iraq in the East to Tunisia in the West-provide clear evidence of the gradually changing roles of the indigenous and the imported which are an intrinsic feature of the movement known in Arabic as al-bahada (cultural revival) and the way in which Arab litterateurs chose to respond to the inspiration that such changes inevitably engendered. --

Author: Norman White
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019818350X
Size: 66.85 MB
Format: PDF, ePub, Mobi
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 531
View: 4746

Book Description: Norman White's biography of Hopkins, the priest-poet, is the most sensitive and well-researched yet published. The author traces Hopkins' development as a poet and a religious professional, and reveals the poems as subtly intimate testimonies to the man's inner turmoil.

Author: Christopher Barnes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521520737
Size: 77.82 MB
Format: PDF, ePub
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 512
View: 3537

Book Description: The concluding volume of Barnes's acclaimed biography of the Russian poet and prose-writer.