Abstract
Here is the opening of a recent book. Its story begins with an enigmatic title introducing a dramatic incident set in nineteenth-century London.
Biographies are, after all, plots shaping and structuring the idea of a life.
(M. Bradbury, ‘The Telling Life: Some Thoughts on Literary Biography’, 1988)1
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Notes and Reference
Malcolm Bradbury, ‘The Telling Life: Some Thoughts on Literary Biography’ in E. Homberger & J. Charmley (eds.), The Troubled Face of Biography (Macmillan, 1988), 139.
Anthony Horowitz, The House of Silk (Orion Books, 2011).
Michael Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families (Chatto and Windus, 2008).
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (trans. G. Rabassa, Penguin, 1982).
John Keats, ‘Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, February 18, 1819’ in R. Gittings (ed.), John Keats: Selected Letters (Oxford University Press, 2002), 203.
Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 1987: 48 & 53.
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© 2015 Michael Benton
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Benton, M. (2015). Plotting A Life. In: Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137549587_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137549587_3
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