This chapter explores some of the usages to which biography – and particularly literary biography – was put in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The analysis begins with Benedict Kiely’s Poor Scholar: A Study of the Works and Days of William Carleton (1947), and subsequently traces the many engagements that were made by Norman A. Jeffares, Richard Ellmann and others with the titanic figures of James Joyce and William Butler Yeats. It then discusses how the much less canonical ‘The Irish Writers Series’, published by Bucknell University, provided a much-utilised platform for students and critics of modern Irish writing, with biographies ranging in subject from James Clarence Mangan to Edna O’Brien. Reflecting on a number of biographies of Irish writers written in this period, it considers the impact of literary biography on the shaping of a twentieth-century narrative of modern Irish writing; in particular, its proximity to traditions of liberal humanism, and its attractiveness to an American academy. The chapter also discusses how, in the 1970s, increased levels of professionalisation and a growing sense of self-confidence in biographical writing coincided with a need for collective reflection and critical commentary.

IN HER TREATISE ON THE CONDITION of contemporary literary criticism, The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski notes how, following ‘a long period of historically orientated scholarship, scholars of literature and art are returning to aesthetics, beauty, and form’. On the one hand, Felski says, this is to be welcomed, kicking as it does against contextual and sociological approaches that would treat writing as a ‘symptom, mirror, index, or antithesis of some larger social structure’. On the other hand, proponents of the New Aestheticism and New Formalism risk repeating errors of old, reverencing the text as timeless, transcendent and self-enclosed in ways that merely bracket the ‘problem of temporality’ without resolving it.

The dilemma Felski outlines here will be familiar to any scholar of the short story. Since its inception in the late nineteenth century, academic criticism has been marked by precisely the kind of ‘zigzagging between dichotomies of text versus context, word versus world’ Felski describes – between the attempt to construct an abstract, transhistorical definition of the form that would distinguish it categorically from the novel, and a countervailing desire to account for the short story's cultural-historical specificity, by aligning it with the development of a particular national literature, say, or with a specific conception of authorship. That the trend in recent years has been strongly in the latter direction is evident from a survey of recent titles: The Postcolonial Short Story, Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story, British Women Short Story Writers, The Short Story and the First World War, and Art and Commerce in the British Short Story – studies whose stress on history, materialism and identity is rooted, more or less explicitly, in a rejection of the kind of formalist and cognitivist approaches favoured by proponents of the so-called ‘new short story studies’ of the 1980s and 1990s: Susan Lohafer, John Gerlach, Charles E. May and others. Where for these earlier critics questions of formal and generic definition were central, today it is the cultural, historical and ideological functions of the short story that predominate.

Of course, such oscillations are ubiquitous across the field of literary studies, as Felski and other surveyors of the ‘postcritical’ future point out.

TomᚠStraüssler (Tomik to his parents) arrived in India as a four-year-old Czech refugee in 1942; but in early 1946 the eight-year-old who left India as Tommy Straüssler would become Tom Stoppard. By then he had a new father, British Army Major Kenneth Stoppard, whom his mother had married after her husband had died in Singapore following the Japanese invasion. He had a new language, English, which he had learned at Mount Hermon, a Darjeeling school run by American Methodists. He had a new nationality - neither American nor Indian nor Czech but British. He had a new identity in a land where he and his brother would be “starting over as English schoolboys.” And he had a new name. Three weeks after arriving in England, the Straüssler brothers received, from their stepfather, the surname Stoppard.

After Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened to acclaim – and a welter of interpretations – both in London and on Broadway, its 29-year-old author would jokingly refer to himself as “a bounced Czech” and dismiss his biographical background as irrelevant to his play about Elizabethan courtiers. But to describe what it felt like to have his play examined for hidden meanings, the Czech émigré who had arrived from Singapore to attend an American school in India before relocating with a new name to Derbyshire significantly invoked the metaphor of going through customs. When a customs officer ransacks Rosencrantz and “comes up with all manner of exotic contraband like truth and illusion, the nature of identity, what I feel about life and death,” Stoppard confesses, “I have to admit the stuff is there but I can’t for the life of me remember packing it.”