Backscheider reflections on biography
- This book is interesting, well written, scholarly without being tedious.
- Backscheider.
- ISBN 0-19-818641-X, $30.00.
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Reflections on Biography
Paula R. Backscheider, Philpott-Stevens Eminent Scholar, specializes in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, feminist criticism, and cultural studies. She is the author of several books including Daniel Defoe: His Life, (winner of the British Council Prize), Spectacular Politics, Reflections on Biography, and Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (winner of the Modern Language Association Lowell Prize). Two of her books have been selected for the Choice Outstanding Academic Book award. She has published articles in PMLA, Theatre Journal, ELH, and many other journals. A former president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, she has held ACLS, NEH, and Guggenheim Fellowships and is one of the few American members of the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Edinburgh. Her most recent book is Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel (Johns Hopkins University Press).
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Reflections on Biography - Softcover
Review
"A vivid and well-researched study useful to both scholars and readers of biography." --Choice
"[Backsheider's] book will be blessed by generations of biographers and historians to come, not only because Backscheider makes the rough places plainer, but because she celebrates the biographer's art as at once compelling, horribly difficult and significant."--London Review of Books
"Encourages both critical and casual readers of biography to examine biography from many angles, and gives a tour of the decisions biographers make and the implications of those choices. Among biographies given special attention are prize-winning lives of writers, intellectual women, the Roosevelts, and unusual marriage partners."--Book News
"[A] fine book.... Beautifully written...full of lively examples.... Backscheider seems to have read every biography worthy reading. More pleasurably, she has the sort of eye for a telling detail or the choice anecdote that a good biographer has.... Backscheider triumphantly demonstrates over and over again that many
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Reflections on Biography
Reflections on Biography, written by the author of an award-winning life of Daniel Defoe, is an invitation to turn 'biography' over in the mind as we turn an artefact in our hands. Intended for all readers of biographyDSlifelong or occasional, critical or casualDSit examines the subject frommany angles, and gives a tour of the decisions biographers make and the implications of those choices. Its aim is to increase the pleasure of reading biographies, to add new, enjoyable dimensions even as it increases readers' insights into the art of writing them. Among the biographies given specialattention are prize-winning lives of writers, mathematical geniuses, intellectual women, the Roosevelts, and unusual marriage partners. The book is full of lively comparisons, for instance, of Keats by Walter Jackson Bate, Andrew Motion, and others, and of a century of biographies of EdithWharton.