The biographical fallacy is a term used in cultural criticism to critique the view that works of creative art, literature or music can be interpreted as reflections of the life of their authors.
[1] Along with the intentional fallacy, the term was introduced by exponents of the New Criticism who wished to emphasise that artworks should be interpreted and assessed as constructed artifacts rather than expressions of the emotions of specific individuals.
[2] This position[1] was referred to as a "fallacy" on the grounds that it neglected both the purely imaginative aspects of the arts and their reliance on formal conventions and rules of genre.
[3]Robert S. Miola, Professor of English at Loyola College in Maryland, discusses the biographical fallacy as "the unqualified conviction that one can read the author's life from the work and vice versa", and adds: This fallacy is widespread in Shakespeare studies, true enough, but the business of wrenching passages out of dramatic context as evidence of the playwright's personal beliefs usually reveals more about the critic than about Shakespeare.
[4]Commenting further on the fallacy as applied to contemporary work about Shakespeare, Joseph Pearce asserts that "For the proponents of ‘queer theory' he becomes conveniently homosexual; for secular fundamentalists he is a proto-secularist, ahead of his time; for ‘post-Christian' agnostics he becomes a prophet of modernity.” [5] Others consider the term offensive and defend biographical criticism in its non-extreme forms, finding that full understanding of an author's works is not possible without extrinsic sources.