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MA in Biography: Special Paper in Biography
Course leader: Professor Jane Ridley
Winter and Spring Terms (60 units)
This 2-term course provides an outline of the development of Biography from Samuel Johnson to the present day. This is combined with discussion of themes such as Literary Biography, Political Biography or Celebrity Biography. Wide and independent reading is encouraged, and students are required to give presentations and to engage in discussion of issues such as the ethics of biography, the influence of authorial voice or the balance between the public and private in biography. The aim of this course is to enable students to evaluate past and present biographical writing and also to appreciate biographical methodology.
Topics studied include:
- Dr Johnson, James Boswell and Biography
- Romantic Biography: Richard Holmes
- Thomas Carlyle and Victorian Biography
- Writing Women's Lives
- Bloomsbury and Biography: Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf
- Political Biography
- Historical Biography
- Life Writing
- Freud and Biography
- Biography and Ethics
- Literary Biography: Michael Holroyd
Assessment : An essay of 8,000 - 10,000 words on a topic of the student's choice which relates to the themes addressed in the course.
General Reading List
- Peter France and William St Clair (eds), Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography (2002)
- Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author", in Image, Music, Text (1977)
- Mark Bostridge (ed.), Lives for Sale: Biographers' Tales (Continuum, 2004)
- James Clifford (ed.), Biography as an Art (1962)
- Leon Edel, Writing Lives (1984)
- Paul John Eakin (ed.), The Ethics of life Writing (2004)
- Michael Holroyd, Works on Paper
- David Ellis, Literary Lives (2000)
- William Empson, Using Biography (1984)
- Robert Gittings, The Nature of Biography (1978)
- Ruth Hoberman, Modernising Lives: Experiments in English Biography 1918-39 (1987)
- Nigel Hamilton, Biography, A Brief History
- id., How To Do Biography (2008)
- Henry James, The Aspern Papers
- Paula Backscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford, 1999)
- Ian Hamilton, Keepers of the Flame (1992)
- John Batchelor, The Art of Literary Biography
- Richard Holmes, Footsteps. Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985)
- id., Sidetracks (2000)
- Eric Homberger and John Charmley, The Troubled Face of Biography , (New York: St Martin's Press), 1988
- Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life
- Dale Salwek (ed.), The Literary Biographer (1996)
- Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Granta, 2005)
- A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (1990)
- Martin Gilbert, In Search of Churchill
- Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf's Nose (Princeton 2007)
- ead., Body Parts (2005)
- Ira Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form
- Christopher Ricks, Essays in Appreciation (1996): see chapters on "Victorian lives" and "Literature and the matter of fact"