Mapping Lives

The Uses of Biography

Edited by Peter France and William St Clair

A British Academy Publication

British Academy Centenary Monographs

Contains contributions by both eminent practitioners and critics

Mapping Lives

The Uses of Biography

Edited by Peter France and William St Clair

A British Academy Publication

British Academy Centenary Monographs

Description

Why biography? This collection of essays on the problems and functions of biography, and particularly the biography of writers, thinkers and artists, investigates a subject of enduring importance for those interested in culture and society. In the last century, it has been a controversial subject, as old models of biographical writing were attacked and superseded, while critics and theorists questioned the once self-evident value of the biography of writers. Yet the genre continues to attract notable authors and is unfailingly popular with readers.

The present volume, while containing essays by practicing biographers, is intended primarily as a stimulus to critical thinking. It focuses on the diverse functions assumed by life-writing in different European countries at different periods, challenging both the notion of a genre with constant characteristics and aims and the view of modern biography as the happy culmination of centuries of progress.

Mapping Lives

The Uses of Biography

Edited by Peter France and William St Clair

A British Academy Publication

British Academy Centenary Monographs

The Proper Study?, Richard Holmes
Gender, Biography, and the Public Sphere, Kay Ferres
From Biography to Hagiography: Some Stable Patterns in the Greek and Latin Tradition of Lives, including Lives of the Saints, Sergei Averintsev
Biography and Autobiography in the Italian Renaissance, Martin McLaughlin
National Biography and the Arts of Memory: From Thomas Fuller to Colin Matthew, Ian Donaldson
From Eulogy to Biography: The French Academic Eloge, Peter France
Adding Stones to the Edifice: Patterns of German Biography, Roger Paulin
Shaping Victorian Biography: From Anecdote to Bildungsroman, Elinor Shaffer
Sainte-Beuve: Biography, Criticism and the Literary, Ann Jefferson
Yury Tynyanov and the 'Literary Fact', Avril Pyman
Freud and the Art of Biography, Malcolm Bowie
The Newness of the 'New Biography': Biographical Theory and Practice in the Early Twentieth Century, Laura Marcus
The Biographer as Archaeologist, William St Clair
Writing Lives Forwards: A Case for Strictly Chronological Biography, Mark Kinkead-Weekes
Shaping the Truth, Miranda Seymour
Sartre's Existential Biographies: A Search for a Method, Christina Howells
A Life on Film, Ian Christie
'The Solace of Doubt?' Biographical Methodology after the Short Twentieth Century, James Walter

Mapping Lives

The Uses of Biography

Edited by Peter France and William St Clair

A British Academy Publication

British Academy Centenary Monographs

Author Information

Contributors:

Richard Holmes
Kay Ferres
Sergei Averintsev
Martin McLaughlin
Ian Donaldson
Peter France
Roger Paulin
Elinor Shaffer
Ann Jefferson
Avril Pyman
Malcolm Bowie
Laura Marcus
William St Clair
Mark Kinkead-Weekes
Miranda Seymour
Christina Howells
Ian Christie
James Walter

Mapping Lives

The Uses of Biography

Edited by Peter France and William St Clair

A British Academy Publication

British Academy Centenary Monographs

Reviews and Awards

"Absorbing and infomative Mapping Lives valuably provides accounts of the genre's development in a range of cultural contexts."--Times Literary Supplement

"An impressive collection of essays about the craft of biography."--The Economist

"It is one of the best contributions to the life-writing critical industry of the last decade."--Modern Language Review