Biography
A biography is a written account of a person's life, typically focusing on their achievements, experiences, and impact on society. It provides a detailed and factual narrative of the individual's life, often including personal anecdotes, historical context, and significant events. Biographies offer insight into the lives of notable figures, allowing readers to gain a deeper understanding of their contributions and legacy.
4 Key excerpts on "Biography"
eBook - ePubLiving In A Learning Society
Life-Histories, Identities And Education
- Ari Antikainen, Jarmo Houtsonen, Juha Kauppila, Hannu Huotelin(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...They write:‘… personal life-records, as complete as possible, constitute the perfect type of sociological data …’ (1958, p. 1832). For Dollard (1949, p. 3), a Biography is an attempt to define and give a theoretical meaning for the development of personality in a certain cultural setting. The case is that in a Biography different parts of culture unite with the life of an individual. When considering the classic definitions of life-stories and their character as scientific research data, we can detect at least three commonly articulated elements (see Shaw, 1980, p. 229): biographies portray the narrator’s socio-cultural environment; biographies portray an individual’s perspective; biographies include a time dimension concerning both the individual and the society. The starting point in a Biography is the individual and his views, closely connected both with the history of his own life and the larger context of his society. The subjective life-story, however, holds the key position through which, and also in which, the social finds its expression. It has been argued from time to time that life-stories obtained by interviews are not authentic in any sense, but they are influenced by a number of different factors. Naturally, a story of one’s own life is always formed under certain conditions of production and it takes its form depending on the narrator’s choices. The informant often faces the problem of transforming his knowing into narrating and giving his experiences a verbal form (White, 1981, pp. 1–2; Mishler, 1986, p. 145). We express our experiences as representations and are able to experience only through our own consciousness. For the researcher, the ultimate aim of the study of life-stories is to achieve the individual’s personal experience...
eBook - ePubExperiments in Life-Writing
Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction
- Lucia Boldrini, Julia Novak, Lucia Boldrini, Julia Novak(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...Within this context, the term “life-writing” itself has emerged to reflect the diverse work conducted in the field. It has now come to stand for a range of writings about lives or parts of lives, or which provide materials out of which lives or parts of lives are composed. These writings include not only memoir, autoBiography, Biography, diaries, autobiographical fiction, and biographical fiction, but also letters, writs, wills, written anecdotes, depositions, court proceedings,. . . marginalia, nonce writings, lyric poems, scientific and historical writings, and digital forms. 1 Biography and autoBiography—two extensive fields of cultural production and academic research now commonly subsumed under life-writing—have in turn come under scrutiny as scholars have attempted to accommodate newly developing forms and direct our gaze to the manifold guises that writings about “real people” can assume. Thus, in their primer Reading AutoBiography (2010), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson discuss the limitations of the term “autoBiography” for contemporary scholarship—its politics of exclusion as regards, for instance, ethnic identity. Following Julie Rak and Leigh Gilmore, Smith and Watson propose a shift from autoBiography as genre to “autobiographical discourse,” using the adjective to designate “self-referential writing” in a more inclusive manner. 2 Hermione Lee’s revised, very broad definition of “Biography” in Biography: A Very Short Introduction (2009) as “the story of a person told by someone else” 3 appears also to pay tribute to the diverse shapes that specific “tellings” can take. However, in common use, the term “Biography” is still primarily taken to denote factual cradle-to-grave narratives in book form, while “life-writing,” as a loose umbrella term, explicitly encompasses auto/biographical fiction, as Zachary Leader notes in the above definition...
eBook - ePub- Barbara Caine(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...A new concern with people’s hidden or unconscious motives, desires and conflicts involved a shift away from Victorian ideals of acceptable conduct and a rather less judgemental approach to human inconsist-ency and frailty. This chapter looks at the history of modern Biography, paying particular attention to the questions of how private life has been depicted and character revealed within it. It also looks at some of the newer approaches to Biography which have become evident with an expanding range of biographical subjects across the twentieth century. The emergence of modern Biography Although the writing of biographies began many centuries ago and was undertaken in significant ways in the classical and the medieval periods, it has expanded greatly in the modern world. The emergence of modern Biography has been seen as a development closely connected to the new approaches to science, sometimes referred to as the scientific revolution, which led to the sense of a life as a phenomenon which, like other natural phenomena, warranted close empirical observation and analysis. 2 It was connected also to the expanding interest in all forms of life writing during the course of the seventeenth century as autobiographies, journals and diaries providing a record of an individual’s life, thoughts and feelings came to be written in increasing numbers. All of this life writing reflects not only the growing recognition of the importance of the individual, as distinct from the family or community, which emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but also the preoccupation with inner and spiritual life, and the encouragement to note and record its development accompanied Puritan revivals. The introduction of the new term ‘Biography’, meaning the history or written record of the life of an individual, in the late seventeenth century was a significant development...
eBook - ePubTransculturing Auto/Biography
Forms of Life Writing
- Rosalia Baena, Rosalia Baena(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Here, the multiply located subject dwells in different cultural spaces and the author, narrator and protagonist, establishes herself as cultural interpreter of the places visited, even as she develops the account of her life in shifting contexts. Another attempt to show the variety and the scope of auto/biographical practices and forms is Ana Beatriz Delgado's "Paradigms of Canadian Literary Biography: Who Will Write Our History?" Delgado posits the Canadian literary Biography as a unique combination of history, individual experience, and literary criticism, that supports the enactment of a literary history that — consciously or not — seeks to define the markers of Canadian identity. She proposes the need to engage in a more inclusive and comprehensive reading of literary biographies, of writers from early and recent literary traditions, as a strategy for examining the forces that made a particular national literature possible, with all its peculiarities and specificities. More than just a story of a writer's life and analysis of his or her work, a literary Biography necessarily reformulates the time and critical context of the writer's production, and reveals the dialogue with culture, nation, and history that writers are involved in, highlighting the manner in which tradition is itself formed and revised. In conclusion, these essays make us aware of the proliferating sites of the autobiographical (Smith and Watson, 2002: 5). The specific critical studies focus on the diversity of forms that transcultural life writing is taking and suggests new ways of reading these increasingly complex texts. Ultimately, to analyze how authors engage differently with the autobiographical mode is to ask questions about the very nature and textures of narratives and the ways that these function in processes of self-formation and self-representation. Note 1...
