Is literary biography so widely read for popular, "prurient" reasons, or for reputable intellectual reasons? Is it of interest only in so far as it illuminates a writer's work? How much can we know about a life, such as Shakespeare's, where the documentation is so slight? These are among the wide range of questions addressed by the seventeen leading biographers and literary critics in this important new work.
Always a popular genre, biography has become one of the most immediate and accessible modes of writing about literature. This book examines such literary figures as Conrad,...