Literary Biography in the Twentieth Century

2018 ◽  
pp. 107-120
Author(s):  
Dale Salwak
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Biography

After-Lives

2020 ◽  
pp. 585-598
Author(s):  
Nora Goldschmidt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
Classical Scholarship ◽  
Limits Of Knowledge ◽  
Roman Poetry ◽  
Literary Biographies ◽  
Creative Life

This chapter explores biographical receptions of Greek and Roman poets in the twentieth century. Classical scholarship has now begun to recognize ancient biography as a creative mode of reception in Antiquity. In the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, reading the texts of Greek and Roman poetry for the lives of their authors has been an especially rich and multifaceted mode of reception, providing for many readers a means of grappling with the ancient texts within the changing cultural landscape of modernity. Yet, unlike the medieval and early modern traditions of literary biography, in the twentieth century, academic and creative Lives have tended to part company. When it comes to Greek and Roman poets, though a few full-length literary biographies that still attempt to claim factual status have been produced, conventional narrative biographies that aim to set out the ‘facts’ are generally only found in isagogic contexts such as introductions to texts and translations, or textbooks of literary history. Moreover, partly because modern authors are acutely aware that there are few ‘facts’ beyond the poets’ works themselves on which to base their material, and partly as a broader consequence of modern preoccupations with fragmentation and the limits of knowledge, creative life-writing about the ancient poets in this period is found more frequently in ludic snapshots rather than full-blown narrative biographies.

scholarly journals INTELLECTUALS IN THE FACE OF HISTORIC TURMOIL: “THE REVENGE OF THE PRINTER” BY STANISLAV ROSOVETSKYJ AS ACADEMIC FICTION

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (93) ◽  
pp. 3-15
Author(s):  
О.В. Блашків
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
Academic Novel ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Times ◽  
Renaissance Man ◽  
Academic Fiction

Since mid-twentieth century the academic novel has been treated in English literary criticism as a separate literary genre centered on the life of professors. Often the action takes place on and outside of campus, revealing the professors’ private concerns. Satire is a characteristic feature of academic novels, which usually drives the action. In these novels university appears as a “microcosm of society at large.” Even though the academic novel is an emerging genre in Ukrainian literature, there are texts which fall into this category. In the article the author analyzes “The Revenge of the Printer” by Stanislav Rosovetskyj as academic fiction. The novel has two plot lines, one of which is set in late 1580s in the times of Ivan Fedorov, another is set in the summer of 1991. The plot lines are joined by the setting, which is St. Onuphrius Monastery in Lviv, which in the twentieth century was turned into the museum of book-printing. The novel has the following features of the academic fiction: the main setting and the object of satire is theIvanFedorovMuseum, a cloistered institution like the university campus; the protagonist Shalva Bukviani is an academic and a professor of history facing the choice to leave the institution or to conform to the changing ideology. Collectively, these characteristics allow to define the main theme as the role of individual in the times of historical turmoil. Special attention is paid to the image of Fedorov, whose life in the novel is portrayed as a literary biography, based on research of contemporary Ukrainian historians alternative to the Soviet narrative. Due to the image of Fedorov as “Renaissance man” in the novel, the image of contemporary scholar appears as Sick Soul (M. Andryczyk), “a small Soviet man” unable to engage in protection of cultural heritage in the time of sociopolitical change.

Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists

1981 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 104
Author(s):  
Bonnie Marranca ◽  
John MacNichols
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Biography

The Literariness of Philosophers’ Lives in Twentieth-Century Polish Prose

Tekstualia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (56) ◽  
pp. 115-126
Author(s):  
Patrycjusz Kisła
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
History Of

The article offers an outline of the history of literary biography, in particular the lives of philosophers, to identify a corresponding tradition in twentieth-century Polish prose. The most important category of analysis is the literariness of texts that border on literature and philosophy. This accounts for the key signifi cance of the problem of genre.

James Still

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Boggess
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
State University ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
University Of Kentucky ◽  
Eastern Kentucky ◽  
Appalachian Literature ◽  
Private World ◽  
The World

James Still was a twentieth century American writer of poetry, stories, children’s literature, and folklore. His most enduring work was the 1940 novel River of Earth. This literary biography tells the story of Still’s life, which was simultaneously simple and complex, solitary and public, transparent and mysterious. Though born in Alabama, educated in Tennessee, and widely traveled in the world, Still and his writing are inseparably associated with the hills of eastern Kentucky: specifically, Hindman Settlement School and his log house on Dead Mare Branch. The biography explores how the place shaped him and his writing, and how this “man of the bushes” became a public figure, a cultural legend that influenced the rise of Appalachian literature. During his last twenty years, many people came to know a charismatic James Still, but few were allowed into his private world. This story of that world explores how his life experiences connected to his creativity. Being of his hills provided James Still an identity and anchor. His life story should help move his work beyond the hills to the wider audience it deserves. Research for the project relied largely on letters and documents in archival collections at University of Kentucky and Morehead State University. Conversations with Still before his death are supplemented with 75 interviews of friends, family, and colleagues.

scholarly journals LEONID BORODIN: TO THE PROBLEM OF CREATIVE INDIVIDUALITY

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 26-38
Author(s):  
N.S. Tsvetova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Basic Concept ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
National History ◽  
The Third ◽  
Key Characters

In the article, L.I. Borodin’s novel The Third Truth is considered against the background of disputes about the historical fate, culture and literature of Siberia in the second half of the twentieth century. The author attempts a holistic reading of The Third Truth using current methods of mythopoetic analysis. Attention is focused on the meaning of the name, on the key artistic concepts and the character series Ryabinin – Selivanov – the Obolenskiye. The poetics of the names of key characters and the artistic space that belongs to them are studied in detail. The basic concept is called the taiga, which is ontologically important for Siberian writers, and allows them to convey a characteristic attitude to nature. In the associative field of the concept, words with axiological semantics are identified. The author comes to the following conclusions: L. Borodin managed to fix the approaching end of the heroic stage of national history in the relationships of key characters; he managed to show in Selivanov’s fate the reflection of the tragedy of the new “urban” reality, which suppresses national and historical instincts and deforms the axiological foundations of existence; the place of this story in the literary biography of L. Borodin is determined by the uniqueness of the created aesthetic reality that corresponds to the idea of traditional artistic systems, but most importantly – the scale and nature of generalizations that characterize the modern civilizational choice.

Cases of Poetry

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
Paul Ricoeur ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
John Clare ◽  
Thomas Love Peacock

This chapter looks at how nineteenth-century biography picked up and transformed the image of the Romantic mad poet from earlier periodical criticism. This occurred first in brief lives and ‘cases of poetry’ in periodicals themselves, then in popular anthologies of the ‘infirmities of genius’, and finally in the larger narratives of poetic irrationality or anti-rationality presented in mid-Victorian literary biography. The chapter makes a particular case study of pivotal biographies in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s by Thomas Medwin, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Thomas Love Peacock, Alexander and Anne Gilchrist, Frederick Martin, and others writing on Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake, and John Clare respectively. The chapter uses readings of these poetic lives to propose a prehistory of twentieth-century psychoanalytic biography or psychobiographical criticism and its ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Paul Ricœur).

Madness and the Romantic Poet

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
Romantic Poet ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This book examines writing that has linked poetry and poets to madness, covering early literary criticism, biography, medical literature, and poetry itself, and moving between the late eighteenth and the twentieth century. More specifically, its purpose is to offer an account of the development and dissemination of the figure of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in the nineteenth century, and to show how this figure interacted with coeval ideas about genius or creativity, and the varying fortunes in reception and reputation of Romantic poets, poetry, and conceptions of Romanticism generally. The opening sections address the currency of popular myths on the topic, and the relevance of modern psychological studies on mental illness and creativity. The greater part of the book focuses on reception, broadly conceived, discussing the Romantic conversation with classical and early modern ideas about poetic madness; attitudes towards the creative and literary mind in the psychiatric medicine of the period; contemporary reviews of Romantic poetry, and the hostile rhetoric of insanity they deployed; and life-writing, moving from early brief lives and popular anthologies of the ‘infirmities of genius’ to the larger narratives of irrationality in Victorian literary biography. Figures discussed include Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Hazlitt, Byron, Lamb, Shelley, and Clare. The book reassesses how Romantic writers both contributed to and resisted the construction of the mad poet, or new and rediscovered mythologies of poetic madness. Finally, the Romantic mad poet is considered as an image of the artist in modernity, and the image’s long afterlife and importance are explained.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document