Subject: Literary Forms

Class: I B.A English

Unit: V
Prepared by: C.J.ANILA
Dept of English
Government Arts and Science College
Sathankulam
Principal: Dr.CHINNATHAI
Government Arts and Science College
Sathankulam
I-BA ENGLISH
BIOGRAPHY
Biography, form of literature, commonly considered nonfictional, the subject
of which is the life of an individual. One of the oldest forms of literary expression,
it seeks to re-create in words the life of a human being—as understood from the
historical or personal perspective of the author—by drawing upon all available
evidence, including that retained in memory as well as written, oral, and pictorial
material.
Biography is sometimes regarded as a branch of history, and earlier biographical
writings—such as the 15th-century Mémoires of the French councellor of
state, Philippe de Commynes, or George Cavendish’s 16th-century life of Thomas
Cardinal Wolsey—have often been treated as historical material rather than as
literary works in their own right. Some entries in ancient Chinese chronicles
included biographical sketches; imbedded in the Roman
historian Tacitus’s Annals is the most famous biography of the emperor Tiberius;
conversely, Sir Winston Churchill’s magnificent life of his ancestor John
Churchill, first duke of Marlborough, can be read as a history (written from a
special point of view) of Britain and much of Europe during the War of the
Spanish Succession (1701–14). Yet there is general recognition today that history
and biography are quite distinct forms of literature. History usually deals in
generalizations about a period of time (for example, the Renaissance), about a
group of people in time (the English colonies in North America), about an
institution (monasticism during the Middle Ages). Biography more typically
focuses upon a single human being and deals in the particulars of that person’s life.
Both biography and history, however, are often concerned with the past, and it is in
the hunting down, evaluating, and selection of sources that they are akin. In this
sense biography can be regarded as a craft rather than an art: techniques of research
and general rules for testing evidence can be learned by anyone and thus need
involve comparatively little of that personal commitment associated with art.

A biographer in pursuit of an individual long dead is usually hampered by a

lack of sources: it is often impossible to check or verify what written evidence
there is; there are no witnesses to cross-examine. No method has yet been
developed by which to overcome such problems. Each life, however, presents its
own opportunities as well as specific difficulties to the biographer: the ingenuity
with which the biographer handles gaps in the record—by providing information,
for example, about the age that casts light upon the subject—has much to do with
the quality of the resulting work. James Boswell knew comparatively little
about Samuel Johnson’s earlier years; it is one of the greatnesses of his Life of
Samuel Johnson LL.D. (1791) that he succeeded, without inventing matter or
deceiving the reader, in giving the sense of a life progressively unfolding. Another
masterpiece of reconstruction in the face of little evidence is A.J.A. Symons’
biography of the English author and eccentric Frederick William Rolfe, The Quest
for Corvo (1934). A further difficulty is the unreliability of most collections of
papers, letters, and other memorabilia edited before the 20th century. Not only did
editors feel free to omit and transpose materials, but sometimes the authors of
documents revised their personal writings for the benefit of posterity, often
falsifying the record and presenting their biographers with a difficult situation
when the originals were no longer extant.

The biographer writing the life of a person recently dead is often faced with the
opposite problem: an abundance of living witnesses and a plethora of materials,
which include the subject’s papers and letters, sometimes transcriptions of
telephone conversations and conferences, as well as the record of interviews
granted to the biographer by the subject’s friends and associates. Frank Friedel, for
example, in creating a biography of the U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, had
to wrestle with something like 40 tons of paper. But finally, when writing the life
of any person, whether long or recently dead, the biographer’s chief responsibility
is vigorously to test the authenticity of the collected materials by whatever rules
and techniques are available. When the subject of a biography is still alive and a
contributor to the work, the biographer’s task is to examine the subject’s
perspective against multiple, even contradictory sources.

AUTOBIOGRAPY
Autobiography, the biography of oneself narrated by oneself.
Autobiographical works can take many forms, from the intimate writings
made during life that were not necessarily intended for publication (including
letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, and reminiscences) to a formal book-
length autobiography.

Formal autobiographies offer a special kind of biographical truth: a life,

reshaped by recollection, with all of recollection’s conscious and unconscious
omissions and distortions. The novelist Graham Greene said that, for this
reason, an autobiography is only “a sort of life” and used the phrase as the
title for his own autobiography (1971).
The Emergence Of Autobiography

There are but few and scattered examples of autobiographical literature in

antiquity and the Middle Ages. In the 2nd century BCE the Chinese classical
historian Sima Qian included a brief account of himself in
the Shiji (“Historical Records”). It may be stretching a point to include, from
the 1st century BCE, the letters of Cicero (or, in the early Christian era, the
letters of Saint Paul), and Julius Caesar’s Commentaries tell little about
Caesar, though they present a masterly picture of the conquest of Gaul and
the operations of the Roman military machine at its most efficient. But Saint
Augustine’s Confessions, written about 400 CE, stands out as unique: though
Augustine put Christianity at the centre of his narrative and considered his
description of his own life to be merely incidental, he produced a powerful
personal account, stretching from youth to adulthood, of his religious
conversion.

Confessions has much in common with what came to be known as

autobiography in its modern, Western sense, which can be considered to have
emerged in Europe during the Renaissance, in the 15th century. One of the
first examples was produced in England by Margery Kempe, a religious
mystic of Norfolk. In her old age Kempe dictated an account of her bustling,
far-faring life, which, however concerned with religious experience, reveals
her personality. One of the first full-scale formal autobiographies was written
a generation later by a celebrated humanist publicist of the age, Enea Silvio
Piccolomini, after he was elevated to the papacy, in 1458, as Pius II. In the
first book of his autobiography—misleadingly named Commentarii, in
evident imitation of Caesar—Pius II traces his career up to becoming pope;
the succeeding 11 books (and a fragment of a 12th, which breaks off a few
months before his death in 1464) present a panorama of the age.
The autobiography of the Italian physician and astrologer Gironimo Cardano
and the adventures of the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini in Italy
of the 16th century; the uninhibited autobiography of the English historian
and diplomat Lord Herbert of Cherbury, in the early 17th; and Colley
Cibber’s Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, Comedian in the early
18th—these are representative examples of biographical literature from the
Renaissance to the Age of Enlightenment. The latter period itself produced
three works that are especially notable for their very different reflections of
the spirit of the times as well as of the personalities of their authors: the
urbane autobiography of Edward Gibbon, the great historian; the
plainspoken, vigorous success story of an American who possessed all
talents, Benjamin Franklin; and the introspection of a revolutionary Swiss-
born political and social theorist, the Confessions of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau—the latter leading to two autobiographical explorations in poetry
during the Romantic period in England, William
Wordsworth’s Prelude and Lord Byron’s Childe Harold, cantos III and IV.
Types Of Autobiography

An autobiography may be placed into one of four very broad types: thematic,
religious, intellectual, and fictionalized. The first grouping includes books
with such diverse purposes as The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920)
and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925, 1927). Religious autobiography
claims a number of great works, ranging from Augustine and Kempe to the
autobiographical chapters of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and John
Henry Cardinal Newman’s Apologia in the 19th century. That century and
the early 20th saw the creation of several intellectual autobiographies,
including the severely analytical Autobiography of the philosopher John
Stuart Mill and The Education of Henry Adams. Finally,
somewhat analogous to the novel as biography is the autobiography thinly
disguised as, or transformed into, the novel. This group includes such works
as Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903), James Joyce’s A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man (1916), George Santayana’s The Last
Puritan (1935), and the novels of Thomas Wolfe. Yet in all of these works
can be detected elements of all four types; the most outstanding
autobiographies often ride roughshod over these distinctions.