Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Linda Leavell (bio) The critical climate of recent decades has favored most forms of life writing. Open the latest edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, American Literature, or World Literature, for example, and you will find letters, diaries, slave narratives, travel narratives, memoirs, and autobiographies that would not have appeared there before the 1980s. But biography? Norton's earliest selections of world literature show biography not yet distinct from heroic epics and the sacred writings of the Old Testament. In the first two of six volumes of English literature, biography is well, but not newly, represented, from Bede's story of Caedmon to Izaak Walton's Life of Dr. John Donne. Near the end of the third volume appear excerpts from James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson. And after that (1791), the point at which biography assumed its modern form, the anthologies include no biography whatsoever. No Elizabeth Gaskell (no biography, that is). No Lytton Strachey. Certainly no Richard Ellmann.1 Why the shunning of this venerable and popular form? Many would trace the disdain for literary biography—in both senses of "literary"—back through Roland Barthes's "death of the author" to the New Critics' division of text from context all the way to T. S. Eliot's theory of impersonality.2 Critical theory of the past century has generally deemed an author's life, personality, and intentions irrelevant to the text. If biography draws suspicion both as literature and as literary criticism, what about as history? Despite the regular appearance of historical biographies at the top of bestseller lists, biography has sunk even lower in history departments than it has in literature departments. It is associated there with the Great Man theory: the view that, in Thomas Carlyle's words, "The History of the world is but the Biography of great men."3 No longer a sequence of kings, generals, battles, and treaties, history has become a confluence of social, economic, and political forces, in which masses of unnamed women and men, the marginalized and oppressed, play as important a role as that of the powerful elite. As biography was sinking into irrelevance and political incorrectness among postmodern academics, it has ironically proved itself fertile ground for postmodern novelists. One of the best places to find [End Page 1] postmodern analyses of biography—through deconstruction, paradox, and parody—is the contemporary fiction section of the local bookstore. Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and A. S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale both overtly engage questions of biography, and many other novels have flirted with the genre.4 The question of whether biography is "a form of fiction," as these novels imply, or "a form of history," as many readers assume, "points to the unresolvable conflict within the practice—and consumption—of biography," says Hermione Lee.5 Lee observed five years ago that the status of biography may at last be rising within the academy. Conferences are being organized. Courses are being offered. Single and multi-author books analyzing the genre appear with regularity. This issue of South Central Review results directly from such activity. Last October, Yale University hosted a symposium on literary biography and modernism. There I met Diane Middlebrook and Brenda Wineapple, both of whom agreed to let their presentations be included here. In the 1990s the National Endowment for the Humanities offered two Summer Seminars on Literary Biography. N. John Hall, who proposed and led these seminars, and Allen Hibbard, my fellow participant in the 1998 one, both contributed essays. Through the South Central Modern Language Association I have come to know, or know better, several scholars interested in biography, among them Janis P. Stout, another contributor, and Melanie Hawthorne, who kindly invited me to serve as guest editor. The six essays here address both the practice and consumption of biography. The first three focus on elements of artistry that biography shares with other literary narratives. Diane Middlebrook argues for the importance of the narrative voice—the creation of a reliable but engaging storyteller—in making biography literary. The narrator's transparency in most biographies does not preclude the necessity for artfully constructing this voice. She analyzes the narrators...