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eBook details

• Title: Sources (Critical Essay)
• Author : English Studies in Canada
• Release Date : January 01, 2006
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 174 KB

Description

I TAKE MY CUE FROM A VICTORIAN ANECDOTE about an immensely learned scholar, Fellow of an Oxford college, being wheeled out on his ninetieth birthday to share his accumulated wisdom with the assembled student body. Peering down at the upturned expectant faces the ancient sage uttered only five words: "Gentlemen: Always check your references." "References" isn't quite the term one might now use, and "Gentlemen" are notoriously a thing of the past, but in all essentials that is a pretty good summary of what I myself want to say here. Sources are of course the indispensable fountainheads of all biography, the word itself suggestive of clear, pure, and inexhaustible springs. But because such promised clarity and purity can so easily become in some way corrupted, betrayed, or downright befouled, I thought I might reflect a little on the problematic aspects of some of the sources most commonly invoked--and on the difficulties and responsibilities of biographers when engaging with them. In pronouncing upon such matters I don't lay claim to much in the way of accumulated wisdom. Nor do I think of myself as "a biographer," let alone a theorist of biography. But I can at least claim or confess to having committed biography in the past--long-term with Thomas Hardy, more flirtatiously with Browning, Tennyson, Henry James, William Faulkner, and Robert Louis Stevenson. I have thus done some service on, so to speak, the frontlines of biography and become familiar with the kinds of skirmishes and even full-scale battles that can readily occur there. Not too much should therefore be inferred from my having in the past delivered papers entitled "On Not Writing Literary Biography" and, more specifically, "On Not Writing a Biography of Robert Louis Stevenson": I have a fondness for negative titles even when they are not altogether justified by the content that follows. I once toyed with "On Not Giving a Lecture" but found it hard to get started.

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