Tekcan The Biographer and the Subject

A Study on Biographical Distance
Erscheinungsjahr 2012
ISBN: 978-3-8382-5995-6
Verlag: ibidem
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 15, 178 Seiten, Format (B × H): 127 mm x 203 mm

Reihe: Studies in English Literatures

A good biography is a well-staged illusion. It creates – on paper – a vivid, rounded, and immediate sense of lived life. In contrast to purely fictional forms, biography writing does not allow total freedom to the biographer in the creative act. Ideally, a biography’s backbone is formed by accurate historical facts. But its soul lies elsewhere. Since the concern is life, something more is needed: Nothing dry, cold or dead, but a vibrant impression of life that is left in the air after one turns over the last page.
But how does a biographer do it? The way a biographer creates a subject is largely dictated by the historical distance between them. There are three types of distance in biographical writing: First, where the biographer and the subject personally know one another; second, where the biographer is a near contemporary of the subject; and third, where biographer and subject are distinctly separated, in some cases, by hundreds of years.
Rana Tekcan explores how some of the most accomplished biographers manage to recreate “life” across time and space. The subjects of her close readings are Samuel Johnson’s Life of Savage, James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, Michael Holroyd’s Lytton Strachey, Park Honan’s Jane Austen, and Andrew Motion’s Keats.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tekcan, Rana

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Eating and Drinking with the Subject: Johnson's Life of Savage and Boswell's Life of Johnson
2. Judas and the Frog Prince: Strachey's Eminent Victorians and Holroyd's Lytton Strachey
3. Too Far for Comfort: Honan's Jane Austen, Her Life and Motion's Keats
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Rana Tekcan is Assistant Professor of English at the Department of Comparative Literature, Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey. She works on biography as a literary genre, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Barbara Pym, and women in modern British literature. She has published articles on Boswell, Austen, and Shakespeare, edited Turkish translations of Pride and Prejudice, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, and translated Vladimir Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense and Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare into Turkish.