On Biography. Critical Essays

Résumé :

These are critical essays on biography. Not theory, not history: criticism, based on textual analyses, by a method rather less often applied to biographies than to works of other genres. The studies are devoted to the works of five contemporary British biographers — Ruth Scurr, Peter Ackroyd, Hermione Lee, Claire Tomalin and Ian Kershaw — selected for their resistances to criticism. This meditation on biography, seeking to break up the husk of its apparent straightforwardness, comes up with the conviction that, since life itself is already writing, it ought to be pursued on philosophical ground.