Autumn 2008

The Biographer’s Presence

Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Biography, autobiography, hagiography, prosopography, fictional biography, bildungsroman, have always been more than they at first appear. Biographers persuade us that lives may, by way of warning, example or otherwise, convey more than a bare story. Group biographies (Suetonius on the Twelve Caesars, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Anthony Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses) seek to establish a pedigree, define an elite, or construct a canon. As biographers shape their stories they have not only their subject, but an audience in view.

‘The gospels are Christology in narrative form,’ suggests Richard Burridge (Four Gospels One Jesus, 1994). Samuel Johnson, on completing his Lives of the Poets in 1781 hoped that he had written ‘in such a manner as may tend to the promotion of piety’. Ernest Renan considered it a truism in 1882 that every nation needs its great men and its heroic past.

Virginia Woolf, whose father Leslie Stephen, was the patriarch of the Dictionary of National Biography, wrote (in ‘How Should One Read a Book?’) a propos of literary lives: ‘we may pull out a play or a poem that they have written and see whether it reads differently in the presence of the author.’ In an article for the Atlantic Monthly in 1939 she accorded biographers a prophetic role. They must ‘go ahead of the rest of us, like the miner’s canary, testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of false conventions.’ Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman (1994) rewrites the received version of the Plath-Hughes story, and refers to ‘the transgressive nature of biography’. And of course postmodernism doubts ‘identity itself, and how texts construct it narratively’ (Steven Weisenburger in John Keener, Biography and the Postmodern Historical Novel, 2001).

Programme

Victorian Milton: David Masson’s Life of John Milton (1859-1880) and the Reinvention of the Puritan Tradition
Dr Marco de Waard, University of Amsterdam

Hagiography versus Biography? A Century of Lives of Tolstoy
Philip Gorski, University of Nottingham

'A Good example to Women': The Biographer's Presence in mid-Seventeenth-Century Women's Conversion Narratives
Rachel Adcock, Loughborough University

Transatlantic Forms of Lived Religion in Anthony Bukoski’s Polonaise
Dr Corina Crisu, University of Bucharest

Early Church Biography in New England: The Case of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana
Ann-Stephane Schäfer, Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz

Full programme

Some of these papers and a number of book reviews appear in The Glass No 21, Spring 2009.