Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Today, biography is one of the publishing industry's most lucrative genres, with the life stories of figures both historical and contemporary appearing weekly, and dominating the review pages of broadsheet newspapers. Within the academy, however, biography as a genre has become deeply unfashionable. Whereas once early modern historians would pin their studies on a single man or woman's life, the trend since the 1960s has been away from the individual and toward the community, class group, or geographical area. Within Renaissance literary studies, the movement has been even more marked: there is now a distinct reluctance to write academic studies that are founded on the notion that a person's life-history or personal psychology can illuminate that person's literary output. The strong influence of poststructuralist criticism has focused attention instead on the literary text, while the tenets of New Historicism, cultural materialism, the history of the book, and other methodological approaches have relocated understanding of that text in various contexts–social, economic, political, religious, and cultural, but rarely if ever narrowly biographical. One side-effect of this marginalization of biography as a methodological tool for the study of early modern literature has been an accompanying marginalization of the study of biography as one of the genres of early modern literature. And ... log in or subscribe to read full text