Biography

In Biography: Writing Lives, Catherine N. Parke surveys life writing from classical times to the present, reviewing the history, theory, and practice of this genre worldwide. She focuses her analysis on biography in Western culture, providing detailed readings of work by watershed biographers, including James Boswell, Richard Ellman, and Gertrude Stein, who together represent the variety and range of modern literary biography.

Parke devotes individual chapters to Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf, reading these writers' significance to modern biography in terms of their dual roles as innovative practitioners and theorists of biography and as subjects of major scholarly and popular lives. Parke also examines the relationship of history and fiction to the genre of biography and inquires into the political, social, and ideological factors that have - consciously or unconsciously - affected biographical practice.