Writing the Lives of Writers

by Warwick Gould (Editor), T. Staley (Editor)

Overview

Writing the Lives of Writers ponders that strange ventriloquized dialogue between biographers and their subjects, a dialogue all the stranger when the subject is a writer. It contains 22 essays by internationally distinguished scholars and biographers including Martin C. Battestin, Isobel Grundy, John Haffenden, Hermione Lee, Lawrence Lipking, Ray Monk, Hazel Rowley, Max Saunders, Martin Stannard and John Worthen. They tackle the lives of Chaucer, Tyndale, More, Fielding and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Wordsworth, Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Yeats, Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Malcolm Lowry, F.R. Leavis, Richard Wright and Brian Penton.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780333684610
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	06/08/1998
Edition description:	1998
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

ANTONY ATKINS Lecturer in English, University of Reading MARTIN C. BATTESTIN Professor of English, University of Virginia, Charlottesville GORDON BOWKER freelance writer PATRICK BUCKRIDGE Senior Lecturer in English, Griffith University DAVID DANIELL Emeritus Professor of English, University of London DAVID ELLIS Professor of English Literature, University of Kent at Canterbury ISOBEL GRUNDY Professor of English, University of Alberta JOHN HAFFENDEN Professor of English, University of Sheffield RUTH KENNEDY Lecturer in English, Royal Holloway, University of London HERMIONE LEE Professor of English, University of York LAWRENCE LIPKING Chester D. Tripp Professor of the Humanities, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois IAN MACKILLOP Reader in English Literature, University of Sheffield RAY MONK Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Southampton MARK ROBSON Lecturer, School of English, University of Leeds HAZEL ROWLEY Emeritus Senior Lecturer in Literature and Communication, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia RICHARD SALMON Lecturer in English Literature, School of English, University of Leeds MAX SAUNDERS Lecturer in English, King's College, University of London MARK STANNARD Professor of English, University of Leicester JOHN WILLIAMS Reader in Literary Studies, University of Greenwich JOANNE WINNING has recently completed her Doctorate at Birkbeck College, University of London JOHN WORTHEN Professor of D.H. Lawrence Studies, University of Nottingham.

Table of Contents

Notes on the Contributors Preface and Acknowledgements A Matter of Life and Death; M.Stannard Life over Literature; or, Whatever Happened to Critical Biography?; J.Haffenden The Birth of the Author; L.Lipking Recreating Chaucer; R.Kennedy William Tyndale: Bricks without Straw; D.Daniell Writing Contexts in William Roper's Life of Thomas More ; M.Robson Life-Writing without Letters: Fielding and the Problem of Evidence; M.C.Battestin 'Acquainted with all the Modes of Life': The Difficulty of Biography; I.Grundy The White Doe of Rylstone : An Exercise in Autobiographical Displacement; J.Williams The Right to Privacy/The Will to Knowledge: Henry James and the Ethics of Biographical Enquiry; R.Salmon Ford, Eliot, Joyce and the Problems of Literary Biography; M.Saunders 'Witch' or 'Bitch'-Which?: Yeats, Archives, and the Profession of Authorship Archive; W.Gould The Biographer and Perspective; J.Worthen Explaining the Abnormal: D.H. Lawrence and Tuberculosis; D.Ellis 'The Past is with me, seen anew': Biography's End in Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage; J.Winning Am I Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; H.Lee Devilish Repressions: Bertrand Russell's Use of Fiction as Autobiography; R.Monk Constructing the Biographical Subject: The Case of Malcolm Lowry; G.Bowker Textual Biography: Writing the Lives of Books; A.Atkins Vignettes: Leavis, Biography and the Body; I.MacKillop Richard Wright: Intellectual Exile; H.Rowley Private Scandals and Public Actions: the Politics of Reputation in the Career of Brian Penton; P.Buckridge Index

Editorial Reviews

A collection of 22 essays in which biographers and scholars examine some of the issues and problems encountered when treating writers. Among them are life-writing without letters, the isolated nature of the writer's professional life, the necessity of showing how the life of writers can be used to reveal their imaginative dynamic, by which readers make sense of their whole body of work and the varieties of their lives. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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