Biography and Autobiography in the Italian Renaissance

During the period of 1300–1600, autobiography and biography flourished in Italy despite the controversial thesis of the ‘rise of the individual’ during the Italian Renaissance. In the same period, a typology of biographical works emerged distinguishing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Italy. These three strands of biography are: collection of lives, a De viris illustribus tradition, revived in Petrarch's work of the same name and inspired by Classical lives of famous rulers, by medieval Viri illustres, and by famous writers and artists; individual biographies, again either of a single ruler or of an individual, and once more derived from Classical models, such as Boccaccio's De vita et moribus Francisci Petrarcchi and Trattatello in laude di Dante; and autobiography, which was pioneered by Petrarch through his Secretum, a purportedly secret dialogue in which St. Augustine was the subject. This chapter discusses distinctive examples of the three strands of biography, with emphasis on the biographies and autobiographies of the writers. It charts the rise and principal developments of these genres during 1350 to 1550.

Gender, Biography, and the Public Sphere

This chapter discusses some of the ways biography – including biographers, the reading and uses of biography, and the practices that represent gender – has treated the problem of women's appearances in public life. The author focuses the discussion on questions of reputation and influence.

Shaping the Truth

Humans who are governed by emotional states have the capacity to establish, develop, and retain different interpretations of the people familiar to them. Hence it is the part of the biographer to examine these untethered interpretations and create from them a portrait that will be identifiable from all angles. A biography cannot present a life in the unclear and multi-faceted form that is its familiar and daily form. A biography in this sense is therefore an illusion. This chapter discusses the challenge of shaping biographies. In it, possible flaws of the biographical genre, including the invasion of privacy to the delivery of truths to one's life story, are considered. The chapter also discusses the standard rules governing the biographer's manner of using confidential information or documents. Particular focus is on the ethics of biography, the rights and the wrongs of presentation of those to whom death affords little protection.

Freud and the Art of Biography

This chapter discusses Freud and the art of biography. It discusses Freud's psychoanalysis, which took an important role in the structuring of biographies, and the role of writing of lives in clinical psychoanalysis. Although Freud understated the role that writing lives has had in clinical psychoanalysis, biographies nevertheless contributed to Freudian psychoanalysis. While they were initially seen from a different perspective, clinical psychoanalysis is, on the whole, closely related to biography, for the encounter between the ‘analysand’ and the analyst involves the writing and rewriting of a life history.

The Proper Study?

Lytton Strachey in 1918 suggested that English biography had found its true calling as the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing. Three generations later, the form has expanded, gained a new broad readership, and achieved intellectual authority. Biography has been called the ‘true art of writing’ and a humanist discipline. It has been hailed as the proper study of mankind. While biography was becoming a recognized art of writing, its value and nature remained a contested issue. In the early days, a biography was primarily a maverick and unacademic form of writing. Academia too was not keen to recognize biography, particularly as a literary genre. It has constantly assaulted the form of biography as trivial, exploitative, fictive, and a corrupter of pure texts and of scholarly morals. And more importantly, a biography was deemed as devoid of serious poetics, post-Aristotelian regulations, and subjective. This chapter examines whether biography is an art and discipline that can be taught and evaluates whether life-writing can be a proper subject for an academic course. It examines the possible contents, aims, and benefits if biography was to be considered as a university subject, including the grounds that would claim biography as a genuine humanist discipline.

‘The Solace of Doubt’? Biographical Methodology after the Short Twentieth Century

This chapter discusses some of the trends in the twentieth century that have emerged in publications on how to write biographies, and emphasizes the trends of the past twenty years. Its focus is on English-language biography. It is suggested that one can understand the present debates as a rethinking of the suppositions of twentieth-century modernist biography.

The Biographer as Archaeologist

Numerous literary biographies of famous authors were normally shaped by the quantity and the nature of the surviving primary documentary evidences such as diaries, letters, notes of constructions, and descriptions of the commentaries. These sources not only shaped the nature of the biographies but also the biographical method adopted. This chapter discusses the nature of the biographical evidence. It examines how biographers who regard their work primarily as an historical investigation can deal with the hard and immovable fact that the sources on which they necessarily rely are normally likely to provide an unrepresentative record of the patterns of the lived life.

Yury Tynyanov and the ‘Literary Fact’

Russian Formalist theory argued that biography should be studied scientifically as the history of form, rather than as a history of personalities, ideas, or content. In other words, the study of literature is not philosophy, sociology, theology, or mythology, but an exact science of the primary matter of text: the word, the language, the speech, and the stylistic device. Biographies of authors were thought of as belonging to the separate ‘series’ parallel to the evolution of literature. However, in practice, the lives and times of the writers were often found not so much to run parallel to as to be contingent upon the texts they produce, in a way that made it increasingly difficult to preserve the clinical purity of the ‘science’ of literature. Hence, to deal with this, Formalists formulated new terms such as ‘literary facts’ and ‘literary milieu’. This chapter discusses Yury Tynyanov, who sought to distinguish his books about the writers' lives from his ‘scientific’ works of theory and research by writing them in the form of novels that were closely associated with film scenarios and historical fiction. It examines his Pushkin, an unfinished biography that culminated his achievements and which marked the beginning of the merging of literary-historical research, biography, and fiction.

Shaping Victorian Biography: From Anecdote to Bildungsroman

By the end of the eighteenth century, European countries sought new functions for biographies. As the appetite and scope for more facts increased, and the need for reshaping them into a matter of national pride became the imperative, the writing of life found new models. This chapter discusses the formation of new models of Victorian biography. In the early nineteenth century, James Field Stanfield wrote a full-scale book on biography and Karl von Morgenstern coined the term Bidungsroman. Both formulated the terms in which biography and novel were to be in close proximity, both in likeness and difference. According to Stanfield, biography must assist in understanding the human character. It should aim to elucidate the range of human possibilities and to impart improvements in education and conduct. Stanfield argued that biography is a serious history wherein the historian is obliged to tell the truth, although at the same time there is a need for censorship in order to protect certain parts of the audience who should be edified by their reading. In these Victorian biographies, the aim was for the improvement of the individual and of the human race; hence certain latitude for the discussion of negative examples is allowed to impart moral illustrations. However, the dominant theme in Victorian biographies was negative representations of living persons. As the Victorian biographies dwindled, a new ideal form, Bidungsroman, unified the clash of unvarnished fact and edification, and closed the gap between novel and biography.

Adding Stones to the Edifice: Patterns of German Biography

This chapter discusses the nature of German biographical tradition, which provides a glimpse into the erudition of biographies in German. German biographical tradition has always been seen as part of historiography, so that its development belongs rather to Wissenschaftsgeschicte than to belles-lettres. Furthermore, biographies within the German context function not just as a record of great names but as a hierarchy of cultural models, canonical literary figures, and representative individuals. As a determiner of national moral values, biography does more than merely memorialize. The biographical tradition of Germany tends to look at representative individuals and biographies as testaments and tangible representatives of the total forces – intellectual, moral, historical – of an age or culture. Seen in these terms, it is a product of national liberalism. The function of German biographical tradition is to annex the lives of the great for the overarching political and cultural ends, hence, biographies tended to be huge, philological, and supremely wissenschaftlich. This high significance of the function of biographies made such life-writing an endeavour inappropriate for the faint-hearted, thus limiting it to the aristocrats of the minds. This contributed to the end of German biographies, as narratives of lives were predominantly accounts of unapproachable geniuses.