Biography
eBook - PDF

Biography

A Brief History

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Biography

A Brief History

About this book

For thousands of years we have recorded real lives--the lives of others, and of ourselves. For what purpose and for whom has this universal and timeless pursuit endured? What obstacles have lain in the path of biographers in the past, and what continues to confound biographers today? Above all, how is it that biographies and autobiographies play such a contested, popular role in contemporary Western culture, from biopics to blogs, from memoir to docudrama?

Award-winning biographer and teacher Nigel Hamilton addresses these questions in an incisive and vivid narrative that will appeal to students of human nature and self-representation across the arts and sciences. Tracing the remarkable and often ignored historical evolution of biography from the ancient world to the present, this brief and fascinating tour of the genre conveys the passionate quest to capture the lives of individuals and the many difficulties it has entailed through the centuries. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to American Splendor, from cuneiform to the Internet, from commemoration to deconstruction, from fiction to fact--by way of famous biographical artists such as Plutarch, Saint Augustine, Sir Walter Raleigh, Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lord Byron, Sigmund Freud, Lytton Strachey, Abel Gance, Virginia Woolf, Leni Riefenstahl, Orson Welles, Julian Barnes, Ted Hughes, Frank McCourt, and many others--Nigel Hamilton's Biography: A Brief History will change the way you think about biography and real lives.

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Yes, you can access Biography by Nigel Hamilton in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Historical Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. Prologue
  3. 1. Evolutionary Biography
  4. 2. Hagiography
  5. 3. The Renaissance of Biography
  6. 4. Victorian Pseudobiography
  7. 5. The Early Twentieth Century
  8. 6. The Rise of Film
  9. 7. The People’s War
  10. 8. Death of the Author
  11. 9. New Directions
  12. 10. Biography Comes of Age
  13. 11. Biography on Trial
  14. 12. The Miner’s Canary
  15. 13. Biography Today
  16. Epilogue
  17. Notes
  18. Bibliography
  19. Acknowledgments
  20. Index