Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Lodger
- Chapter 2 Oedipus Express
- Chapter 3 Railway Reading
- Chapter 4 ‘From Autumn to Spring, Aesthetics Change’
- Chapter 5 ‘A Hymn to Movement’
- Chapter 6 Staging the ‘Private Theatre’
- Chapter 7 The Newness of the ‘New Biography’
- Chapter 8 European Witness
- Chapter 9 Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness
- Chapter 10 Directed Dreaming
- Chapter 11 ‘In the Circle of the Lens’
- Chapter 12 Virginia Woolf and the Art of the Novel
- Index
- References
Chapter 7 - The Newness of the ‘New Biography’
Biographical Theory and Practice in the Early Twentieth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Lodger
- Chapter 2 Oedipus Express
- Chapter 3 Railway Reading
- Chapter 4 ‘From Autumn to Spring, Aesthetics Change’
- Chapter 5 ‘A Hymn to Movement’
- Chapter 6 Staging the ‘Private Theatre’
- Chapter 7 The Newness of the ‘New Biography’
- Chapter 8 European Witness
- Chapter 9 Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness
- Chapter 10 Directed Dreaming
- Chapter 11 ‘In the Circle of the Lens’
- Chapter 12 Virginia Woolf and the Art of the Novel
- Index
- References
Summary
The dominance of modernist and avant-garde literature in the first decades of the twentieth century has directed attention away from certain texts and genres. Biography is a prime example of this process. While numerous histories of the biographical genre do exist, few critics have attempted to situate early twentieth-century biography in the broader literary and cultural arena. Those who focus on modernist experimentation rarely consider the ways in which biographers approached the new aesthetics, or address the extraordinary popularity and perceived significance of the genre in the period of ‘high modernism’. Yet the marked increase in the popularity of biography during this period – the 1920s and 1930s particularly – was closely connected to the new forms of, and experiments with, the genre. ‘It is the day of the biographer’, Hesketh Pearson wrote in 1930. The rise in popularity of biographies was linked to the perception that biography had been reinvented for the twentieth century, requiring a new level of critical self-awareness.
David Cecil, for example, writing in 1936, called biography ‘the only new form’ of modern literature. Its newness and its success were due, he suggested, to the fact that it was the genre most congenial to the ‘scientific’ modern age, and the one most allied to modern psychology and the study of ‘human character’. Biography is, he argued, on the side of science on the one hand, while, on the other, biographers approach their subjects with newly aesthetic aims, taking advantage of a ‘literary’ space made available by the mutual lack of sympathy between literature (particularly poetry) and scientific modernity. Cecil’s argument is clearly flawed (there is no evidence that poets and novelists in the 1920s and 1930s felt peculiarly threatened by science, and indeed many embraced its terms), but it is echoed in numerous discussions of the ‘new biography’, in which, as we shall see, the relationship between the literary and the scientific and the importance of the study of ‘character’ are two of the dominant themes.
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Dreams of ModernityPsychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema, pp. 124 - 150Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
References
’s Modernizing Lives: Experiments in English Biography, 1918–1939 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987)Google Scholar
’ important study Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York: Greenwood Press, 1979)Google Scholar
, Recognizing Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘The Biography as an Art Form of the New Bourgeoisie’ (1930), in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, edited and translated by (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 103Google Scholar
, ‘The New Biography: Ludwig, Maurois and Strachey’, The Atlantic Monthly 143 (March 1929), p. 133Google Scholar
, Contemporary Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934), p. 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘Introduction: On Historical Portraiture’, Genius and Character (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co, 1927), pp. 13–17Google Scholar
, ‘Lytton Strachey and the Art of Biography’, in Memories (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1953), p. 37Google Scholar
, ‘The New Biography’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, edited by (London: The Hogarth Press, 1994), p. 473Google Scholar
, ‘Character in Fiction’ (1924), in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 1919–1924, pp. 420–438, 421Google Scholar
, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester University Press, 1994), especially chapter 1Google Scholar
, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (1903) (Norwich: Pilgrim Books, 1992), p. 173Google Scholar
, ‘Lady Hester Stanhope’, in Books and Characters (London: Chatto and Windus, 1922), p. 241Google Scholar
‘“Looking Glasses at Odd Corners”: Biography and Psychoanalysis in the Early Twentieth Century’, New Comparison 25, Spring 1998, 52–70
, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), p. 146Google Scholar
, ‘Tradition in Biography’, in Tradition and Experiment in Present-Day Literature (Oxford University Press, 1929), p. 155Google Scholar
, The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (1934) (London: Quartet, 1993), p. 51Google Scholar
, ‘The Art of Biography’ (1939) The Essays of Virginia Woolf, edited by (London: Hogarth Press, 2011), pp. 181–194, 186Google Scholar
, Letter to , 25 December 1928, in Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey 1924–25, edited by and (New York: Basic Books, 1985), pp. 332–333Google Scholar
, Letter to , 31 May 1936, in The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig edited by (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), p. 127Google Scholar
, Letter to , 17 October 1909, in The Freud/Jung Letters (abridged), edited by (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 161Google Scholar
, ‘The Sceptical Biographer’, in (ed.), Biography as an Art: Selected Criticism 1560–1960 (Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 149Google Scholar
Accessibility standard: Unknown
Why this information is here
This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.Accessibility Information
Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this chapter is currently unknown
and may be updated in the future.