This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This is to thank all those who have contributed to the development of this page. Biographical criticism is, of course, an essential and important dimension of any fully informed literary criticism, and I was shocked when I first learned that there was no wikipedia entry on the topic. -- BenJonson ( talk) 18:45, 9 November 2011 (UTC)
It doesn't seem to me that the type of biographical criticism this article is about applies to Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Johnson actually examines the author's statements about their own lives, according to the review cited. I don't see anywhere that he criticises their work based on biographical details. Tom Reedy ( talk) 15:38, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
Here is a description of Johnson's "biographical criticism": When it came to biography, Johnson disagreed with Plutarch's use of biography to praise and to teach morality. Instead, Johnson believed in portraying the biographical subjects accurately and including any negative aspects of their lives. Because his insistence on accuracy in biography was little short of revolutionary, Johnson had to struggle against a society that was unwilling to accept biographical details that could be viewed as tarnishing a reputation; this became the subject of Rambler 60. [1] Furthermore, Johnson believed that biography should not be limited to the most famous and that the lives of lesser individuals, too, were significant; [2] thus in his Lives of the Poets he chose both great and lesser poets. In all his biographies he insisted on including what others would have considered trivial details to fully describe the lives of his subjects.
As you can see, it is quite different from the topic of this article, and in fact, this article should be rewritten to include the common understanding of what is meant by the term, that is, a critical theory of biographical works. You might start by reading Keepers of the Flame: literary estates and the rise of biography by Ian Hamilton, which I just finished. I think you'd find it very interesting, especially the early biographers such as Izaak Walton, who wrote the first literary biography of John Doone without mentioning his poetry. Tom Reedy ( talk) 17:58, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
References
Because, dear Smatprt, if you read the page in the source, you will see that the Peripatetics (followers of Aristotle) did not engage in biographical criticism as a school of criticism. What they did was to try to find biographical information from the literary work, then later critics used that biographical speculation as if it were an external source to explain that same literary work. The point of that section is to point out the circularity of their method, not that they engaged in "biographical criticism" as a school of criticism. IOW, they weren't "show[ing] the relationship between authors lives and their works of literature" (as per the definition given in note 1), they were reading the work of literature to find something about the author's life, which speculation was then later used by others to "show the relationship between authors lives and their works of literature". Do you see the difference? Tom Reedy ( talk) 19:37, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
Tom, I fear you are really going off on a tangent or have somehow become confused about this. You left this on my talk page "Biographical criticism is the literary theory of biography. I've also found material on it as per the definition given at Biographical criticism, but it seems to be a minority view among academic critics." While I suppose that the term might be used (confusedly) in numerous ways, this article is about the term as defined in the article, which is well sourced and is the common definition (not a minority one). I've previously supplied numerous academic references and links (as have you) attesting to this. And here is a short refresher course for you from other academics: [ [1]]. And another [ [2]], and another (scroll down to "Divisions of Literary Criticism" [ [3]]. Smatprt ( talk) 22:59, 2 April 2010 (UTC) You also might take this short quiz: [ [4]] and see how you rate. Smatprt ( talk) 23:05, 2 April 2010 (UTC)
Smatprt, can you quote us some passages that indicate that biographical criticism is used to analyze Shakespeare's biography to show the relationship between his life and his work? The few pages of the reference available on Google books demonstrate the exact opposite, i.e. that the works (in this case the sonnets) are used to speculate about his biography. Tom Reedy ( talk) 01:48, 5 April 2010 (UTC)
This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This is to thank all those who have contributed to the development of this page. Biographical criticism is, of course, an essential and important dimension of any fully informed literary criticism, and I was shocked when I first learned that there was no wikipedia entry on the topic. -- BenJonson ( talk) 18:45, 9 November 2011 (UTC)
It doesn't seem to me that the type of biographical criticism this article is about applies to Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Johnson actually examines the author's statements about their own lives, according to the review cited. I don't see anywhere that he criticises their work based on biographical details. Tom Reedy ( talk) 15:38, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
Here is a description of Johnson's "biographical criticism": When it came to biography, Johnson disagreed with Plutarch's use of biography to praise and to teach morality. Instead, Johnson believed in portraying the biographical subjects accurately and including any negative aspects of their lives. Because his insistence on accuracy in biography was little short of revolutionary, Johnson had to struggle against a society that was unwilling to accept biographical details that could be viewed as tarnishing a reputation; this became the subject of Rambler 60. [1] Furthermore, Johnson believed that biography should not be limited to the most famous and that the lives of lesser individuals, too, were significant; [2] thus in his Lives of the Poets he chose both great and lesser poets. In all his biographies he insisted on including what others would have considered trivial details to fully describe the lives of his subjects.
As you can see, it is quite different from the topic of this article, and in fact, this article should be rewritten to include the common understanding of what is meant by the term, that is, a critical theory of biographical works. You might start by reading Keepers of the Flame: literary estates and the rise of biography by Ian Hamilton, which I just finished. I think you'd find it very interesting, especially the early biographers such as Izaak Walton, who wrote the first literary biography of John Doone without mentioning his poetry. Tom Reedy ( talk) 17:58, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
References
Because, dear Smatprt, if you read the page in the source, you will see that the Peripatetics (followers of Aristotle) did not engage in biographical criticism as a school of criticism. What they did was to try to find biographical information from the literary work, then later critics used that biographical speculation as if it were an external source to explain that same literary work. The point of that section is to point out the circularity of their method, not that they engaged in "biographical criticism" as a school of criticism. IOW, they weren't "show[ing] the relationship between authors lives and their works of literature" (as per the definition given in note 1), they were reading the work of literature to find something about the author's life, which speculation was then later used by others to "show the relationship between authors lives and their works of literature". Do you see the difference? Tom Reedy ( talk) 19:37, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
Tom, I fear you are really going off on a tangent or have somehow become confused about this. You left this on my talk page "Biographical criticism is the literary theory of biography. I've also found material on it as per the definition given at Biographical criticism, but it seems to be a minority view among academic critics." While I suppose that the term might be used (confusedly) in numerous ways, this article is about the term as defined in the article, which is well sourced and is the common definition (not a minority one). I've previously supplied numerous academic references and links (as have you) attesting to this. And here is a short refresher course for you from other academics: [ [1]]. And another [ [2]], and another (scroll down to "Divisions of Literary Criticism" [ [3]]. Smatprt ( talk) 22:59, 2 April 2010 (UTC) You also might take this short quiz: [ [4]] and see how you rate. Smatprt ( talk) 23:05, 2 April 2010 (UTC)
Smatprt, can you quote us some passages that indicate that biographical criticism is used to analyze Shakespeare's biography to show the relationship between his life and his work? The few pages of the reference available on Google books demonstrate the exact opposite, i.e. that the works (in this case the sonnets) are used to speculate about his biography. Tom Reedy ( talk) 01:48, 5 April 2010 (UTC)