Introduction Theory of Biography or Biography in Theory?

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter I
2. Contents V
3. Introduction Theory of Biography or Biography in Theory? 1
4. The Rambler 60 (13 October 1750) 9
5. The Idler 24 (24 November 1759) 13
6. Samuel Johnson’s Advice to Biographers 15
7. Fifth Letter on the Furtherance of Humanity (1793) 19
8. The Living Memory of Biography: Johann Gottfried Herder’s ‘Fifth Letter on the Furtherance of Humanity’ 22
9. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History [Extract] (1840) 27
10. World History as Heroic Biography: Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Great Men’ 30
11. Plan for the Continuation of the Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences [Extract] [1904–10] 35
12. Between Art and Academia: Wilhelm Dilthey’s Theory of Biography 41
13. The Method of Sainte-Beuve [Extract] [1909] 47
14. Against Biographical Interpretation: Marcel Proust’s Attack on Sainte-Beuve 55
15. Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood [Extract] (1910) 61
16. The Riddles of Sigmund Freud’s Leonardo – Biography, Case History, or …? 68
17. Preface to Eminent Victorians (1918) 76
18. Biography as Exposure: Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians 78
19. Literature and Biography (1923) 83
20. In Search of the Literary Fact: Boris Tomashevsky and the Limits of the Biographical Approach 91
21. The Biography of the Object (1929) 97
22. In the Name of the Collective: Sergei Tretiakov’s Plea for a Biography of the Object 101
23. The Biography as an Art Form of the New Bourgeoisie (1930) 107
24. How to Make Employees Matter: Siegfried Kracauer’s Critique of Biography 112
25. The New Biography (1927) 119
26. The Art of Biography (1939) 124
27. The Biographical Craft: Virginia Woolf’s Contributions to the Theory of Biography 131
28. History as a Poetess (1943) 136
29. Biography between Poetry and History: Stefan Zweig’s ‘History as a Poetess’ 148
30. The Progressive-Regressive Method [Extract] (1957) 155
31. Tracing the ‘projet original’: Jean-Paul Sartre’s Biographical Hermeneutics 166
32. Sade, Fourier, Loyola [Extract] (1971) 175
33. A Life in Memory Fragments: Roland Barthes’s ‘Biographemes’ 178
34. ‘Hanging Up Looking Glasses at Odd Corners’: Ethnobiographical Prospects (1978) 186
35. Provincializing the Biographical Subject: James Clifford’s Manifesto for a ‘Less Centred’ Biography 198
36. Landscape for a Good Woman [Extract] (1986) 204
37. Intersectional Biography: Class, Gender, and Genre in Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman 206
38. The Biographical Illusion (1986) 210
39. Life as Trajectory: Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘The Biographical Illusion’ (1986) 217
40. Representing Women: Re-presenting the Past [Extract] (1989) 229
41. Things Mean Differently at Different Historical Moments: Re-thinking (Literary) History and Biography 238
42. Post-Thomas Edison (Recalling an Anti-Biography) (2003) 244
43. From ‘Anti-Biography’ to Online Biography? 256
44. Approaching Celebrity Studies [Extract] (2010) 263
45. Biography and Celebrity Studies 269
46. List of Sources 276
47. Editorial Note 278
48. Select Bibliography 279
49. List of Contributors 287