Biographical criticism

[4] This longstanding critical method dates back at least to the Renaissance period,[5] and was employed extensively by Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets (1779–81).

Notwithstanding this critique, biographical criticism remained a significant mode of literary inquiry throughout the 20th century, particularly in studies of Charles Dickens and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others.

The method continues to be employed in the study of such authors as John Steinbeck,[2] Walt Whitman[3] and William Shakespeare.

It has often been argued that it is a development from Romanticism, but it also stands in opposition to the Romantic tendency to view literature as manifesting a "universal" transcendence of the particular conditions of its genesis.

Not only do biographies suggest that things as difficult as human lives can – for all their obvious complexity – be summed up, known, comprehended: they reassure us that, while we are reading, a world will be created in which there are few or no unclear motives, muddled decisions, or (indeed) loose ends.