Biography: A Brief History

Author - Nigel Hamilton ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Hardcover Book item from Harvard University Press was reviewed on 26-Oct-2008.

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1) Hardcover Book Biography: A Brief History by Harvard University Press. How can one take this book seriously when one reads the following on Page 124? "Another commissioned but then contested work was that of James Anthony Froude, who was asked by the great Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle to be his posthumous official biographer. Froude subsequently fell afoul of Carlyle´s surviving daughter, Mary, who considered his four-volume biography (beginning in 1884) to be defamatory - even though Froude had nobly omitted much telling evidence of spousal abuse and impotence. There followed a three-decade-long war between the party of the official biographer and the daughter - one that was never resolved."
Carlyle probably was impotent and his marriage had never been consummated - he certainly had no children! Mary was a niece, not a "surviving daughter." Readers interested in the history of biography would be much better served by reading A.O.J. Cockshut´s "Truth To Life:The Art of Biography in the Nineteenth Century" (1974) or "The Art of Autobiography in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Cenutry England" (1984).
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2) Hardcover Book Biography: A Brief History by Harvard University Press. We live in a time in which we are overwhelmed by biographical information. The ´Internet´ now has millions of people frantically posting the most intimate and even more often the most trivial details of their lives. The barriers which once made it impossible to invade the privacy of public figures have been legally torn down. Scandal, gossip, and the real inside stuff are now provided to an ever more hungry public in tons. There are also more respectable developments in this flourishing area including more responsible, detailed scholarly work.
It wasn´t always this way. And Nigel Hamilton tells the story of the liberalization, tracing the history of Biography as a literary - genre beginning with ´Gilgamesh´ and hitting milestones along the way towards the twentieth century. Great turning - point works such as those of Augustine, Samuel Johnson (Boswell) Rousseau, Lytton - Strachey are interpreted for their contribution to the overall development of the genre
One central question considered is whether it is the task of the biographer to tell an ideal story of a model figure, an example for imitation or to provide the whole truth about the figure in question. Our world of course has it all , from niche publisher hagiographies to mass- market ´tell - it-alls´ and the direction has been in opening up more and more areas of the person´s life for investigation and consideration. Another major trend is toward the ´fictionalization´ of biography and the using speculative, imaginative means. Peter Ackroyd does this with his ´Dickens´ and Edmund Morris becomes a character in ´Reagan´.
Hamilton maintains that ´biography´ is now the most popular form of non- fiction writing today. He too is peeved that the academic world does not give enough respect to the Genre. He also tries to argue for the poltiical importance of Biography as being a form which flourishes in Democracies and is stifled in totalitarian and fascist regimes.
Hamilton as a biographer himself (Robert Lowell)knows the territory and provides an edifying historical survey.¤

3) Hardcover Book Biography: A Brief History by Harvard University Press.

For thousands of years we have recorded real lives--the lives of others, and of ourselves. For what purpose and for whom has this universal and timeless pursuit endured? What obstacles have lain in the path of biographers in the past, and what continues to confound biographers today? Above all, how is it that biographies and autobiographies play such a contested, popular role in contemporary Western culture, from biopics to blogs, from memoir to docudrama?

Award-winning biographer and teacher Nigel Hamilton addresses these questions in an incisive and vivid narrative that will appeal to students of human nature and self-representation across the arts and sciences. Tracing the remarkable and often ignored historical evolution of biography from the ancient world to the present, this brief and fascinating tour of the genre conveys the passionate quest to capture the lives of individuals and the many difficulties it has entailed through the centuries. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to American Splendor, from cuneiform to the Internet, from commemoration to deconstruction, from fiction to fact--by way of famous biographical artists such as Plutarch, Saint Augustine, Sir Walter Raleigh, Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lord Byron, Sigmund Freud, Lytton Strachey, Abel Gance, Virginia Woolf, Leni Riefenstahl, Orson Welles, Julian Barnes, Ted Hughes, Frank McCourt, and many others--Nigel Hamilton´s Biography: A Brief History will change the way you think about biography and real lives.

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Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 23-Nov-2008, 06740246649780674024663, 310-730-520-640-650-261-071-8

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