Critical literary biography example

Biography Definition

A biography (BYE-og-ruh-fee) is a written account of one person’s life authored by another individ. A biography includes all pertinent details from the subject’s life, typically arranged in a chronological order. The word biography stems from the Latin biographia, which succinctly explains the word’s definition: bios = “life” + graphia = “write.”

Since the advent of the written word, historical writings have offered information about real people, but it wasn’t until the 18th century that biographies evolved into a separate literary genre. Autobiographies and memoirs fall under the broader biography genre, but they are distinct literary forms due to one key factor: the subjects themselves write these works. Biographies are popular source materials for documentaries, television shows, and motion pictures.

The History of

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Rowling’s ‘Critical Biography:’ Three Suggestions for Who Should Write It

The landmark event of what we are calling the Fourth Generation of Rowling Studies, in which the author’s life events are folded into an appreciation of her writing accomplishments will be the appearance of a ‘critical biography’ of merit that has this as its only purpose, that is, relating the subject’s life events and reading those works strictly within that context. See Brian Boyd’s magisterial two volume biography of Nabokov, Claire Tomalin’s lives of Dickens, Austen, and Wollstonecraft, and Lois Potter’s Shakespeare: A Critical Biography for examples of the defining work of this type.

Given the quality of her advisers and her own remarkable self-awareness, I think it can safely be assumed Rowling, Inc., has plans to take charge of her legacy now, lest a click-bait bio-critical narrative commissioned by her Genderist enemies today be set in st

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This blog has been quiet for quite a while – for the most part because my writing time has been focused on my new book, Bavinck: A CriticalBiography. This book has been many years in the making, and is now due for release this September with Baker Academic. (The cover art is an original portrait by the multitalented Oliver Crisp.)

In recent times, I have been asked by a few people, ‘What’s a critical biography?’ Here’s my attempt at an answer. A biography, of course, is the story of someone’s life. Why would you try to recount a life story? A biographer might do so for commemorative reasons: to tell the world about a great human spirit, to bolster a community or a tradition by telling them noble tales of their particular hero, and so on. That kind of biographical writing tends to present its human subject in the most flattering light: think of old school hagiography, or the more recent sort of glossy ‘authorised’ biography.