Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography

Drawing upon a wide range of biographies of literary subjects, from Shakespeare and Wordsworth to William Golding and V.S. Naipaul, this book develops a poetics of literary biography based on the triangular relationships of lives, works and times and how narrative operates in holding them together. Biography is seen as a hybrid genre in which historical and fictional elements are imaginatively combined. It considers the roles of story-telling, factual data in the art of life-writing, and the literariness of its language. It includes a case study of the biography of Ellen Terry, discussion of the controversial relationship between a subject's life and works, 'biographical criticism' and, through the issue of gender, the social and cultural changes biographies reflect. It frames a poetics on the basis of its strategy and tactics and demonstrates how the literal truth of verifiable data and the poetic truth of what is narrated are interdependent.

Michael Benton is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Southampton, UK. His publications include Teaching Literature 9 – 14 (with Geoff Fox) and several anthologies of poetry, notably Touchstones (with Peter Benton). His most recent books are Studies in the Spectator Role: Literature, Painting & Pedagogy (2000) and Literary Biography: An Introduction (2009).