Biography
It involves more than just basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's experience of these life events.
According to Egyptologist Miriam Lichtheim, writing took its first steps toward literature in the context of the private tomb funerary inscriptions.
One of the earliest Roman biographers was Cornelius Nepos, who published his work Excellentium Imperatorum Vitae ("Lives of outstanding generals") in 44 BC.
Another well-known collection of ancient biographies is De vita Caesarum ("On the Lives of the Caesars") by Suetonius, written about AD 121 in the time of the emperor Hadrian.
In Medieval Western India, there was a Sanskrit Jain literary genre of writing semi-historical biographical narratives about the lives of famous persons called Prabandhas.
The earliest biographical dictionaries initially focused on the lives of the prophets of Islam and their companions, with one of these early examples being The Book of The Major Classes by Ibn Sa'd al-Baghdadi.
Following Malory, the new emphasis on humanism during the Renaissance promoted a focus on secular subjects, such as artists and poets, and encouraged writing in the vernacular.
[5] A notable early collection of biographies of eminent men and women in the United Kingdom was Biographia Britannica (1747–1766) edited by William Oldys.
Boswell's work was unique in its level of research, which involved archival study, eye-witness accounts and interviews, its robust and attractive narrative, and its honest depiction of all aspects of Johnson's life and character – a formula which serves as the basis of biographical literature to this day.
[11] Biographical writing generally stagnated during the 19th century – in many cases there was a reversal to the more familiar hagiographical method of eulogizing the dead, similar to the biographies of saints produced in Medieval times.
[12] Autobiographies became more popular, as with the rise of education and cheap printing, modern concepts of fame and celebrity began to develop.
Clearly these psychological ideas were changing the way biographies were written, as a culture of autobiography developed, in which the telling of one's own story became a form of therapy.
Up until this point, as Strachey remarked in the preface, Victorian biographies had been "as familiar as the cortège of the undertaker", and wore the same air of "slow, funereal barbarism."
His narrative demolished the myths that had built up around these cherished national heroes, whom he regarded as no better than a "set of mouth bungled hypocrites".
The book achieved worldwide fame due to its irreverent and witty style, its concise and factually accurate nature, and its artistic prose.
This new school featured iconoclasts, scientific analysts, and fictional biographers and included Gamaliel Bradford, André Maurois, and Emil Ludwig, among others.
American professional historiography gives a limited role to biography, preferring instead to emphasize deeper social and cultural influences.
Political biographers historically incorporated moralizing judgments into their work, with scholarly biography being an uncommon genre before the mid-1920s.
However, many biographers found that their subjects were not as morally pure as they originally thought, and young historians after 1960 tended to be more critical.
A more promising approach is to locate a person's ideas through intellectual history, but this has become more difficult with the philosophical shallowness of political figures in recent times.
Heilbrun named 1973 as the turning point in women's autobiography, with the publication of May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, for that was the first instance where a woman told her life story, not as finding "beauty even in pain" and transforming "rage into spiritual acceptance," but acknowledging what had previously been forbidden to women: their pain, their rage, and their "open admission of the desire for power and control over one's life.
Unlike books and films, they often do not tell a chronological narrative: instead they are archives of many discrete media elements related to an individual person, including video clips, photographs, and text articles.
Media scholar Lev Manovich says that such archives exemplify the database form, allowing users to navigate the materials in many ways.
President of Wolfson College at Oxford University, Hermione Lee argues that all history is seen through a perspective that is the product of one's contemporary society and as a result, biographical truths are constantly shifting.
