Biography, vol. 19, no. 1 (Winter 1996)
ARTICLES
Trollope to His Readers: The Unreliable Narrator of An
Autobiography, pp. 1-18
Peter Allen
Considered as a work specifically addressed to the circle of his
readers, An Autobiography reveals the complexity of Trollope's
artistic self-awareness and his wilful courting of misunderstanding
as a protest against simplistic interpretation, as an invitation
to look again, to read both his character and his works more carefully.
Authorial Authority: Johnson's Life of Savage and
Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol, pp. 19-40
Jamie Bush
Authorial biographies—biographies written by authors—as
exemplified by Johnson's Life of Savage and Nabokov's Nikolai
Gogol, constitute a distinctive subgenre of biography, remarkable
for, among other features, a relative unconcern with facts, ideological
independence, antipanegyrical orientation, and a tendency toward
self-assertion and self-investment. This article compares the
strategies by which Johnson and Nabokov constitute themselves
as authors while operating within the biographical form.
Political Intrigue and Family Conflict During the Civil
War: The Beechers of Elmira, pp. 41-56
Myra C. Glenn
In 1862 Thomas K. Beecher, chaplain of the 141st New York Regiment,
accused his commanding officer of treason. This accusation earned
him the enmity of his fellow officers, and caused his younger
brother James, a lieutenant colonel in the regiment, to attempt
suicide and later leave the 141st. In exploring these events,
this article illuminates the sibling tensions in the Beecher family,
and offers a case study of the intrigue that roiled many regiments
during the Civil War.
The Humanistic and Pluralistic Quest: Theory as Biography
and Testament, pp. 57-86
Daniel R. Schwarz
My essay relates my life to my work as a humanistic critic, and
argues that my theoretical and critical perspective is a kind
of life-writing. Strands of my life coalesce in my pluralistic
perspective and in my choice of subjects for my critical work:
Conrad, Joyce, Disraeli, Stevens, Woolf, and Lawrence. I consider
in particular how a Jewish perspective informs my work, and examine
that perspective in relation to my arguing for a revised humanistic
criticism that insists that texts are by human authors for human
readers about human subjects, and that is interested in how and
why people think, write, act, and ultimately live.
Probing the Origins of Literary Biography: English and Russian
Versions, pp. 87-104
Anna Makolkin
Tracing the origins of biography to funeral songs and narratological
structures used in mourning, this article explores the origins
of literary and nonliterary biography, and provides suggestions
about the origins of other literary genres which the author sees
as coming from biography. A comparative analysis of Greek, Roman,
English, and Russian biographical traditions suggests narrative
generic invariants which transcend time, geography, religion,
and linguistic code, and manifest themselves in the biographical
changes through preheroic, heroic, antiheroic, and postheroic
stages. The article also explores the impact of dominant social
beliefs upon biography and the relationship between society and
biography, and addresses the problem of a specific biographical
subject—the poet—and the more advanced stages of biographical
writing which seem to be found in all cultures.
REVlEWS, pp. 105-107
Reviews of new books.
REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, pp. 108-113
Extracts of reviews of biographies published in other sources.
LIFELINES, pp. 114-115
Notes and announcements
|
