Can I read 'biography: Fiction, Fact And Form' on EtoBox?

'biography: Fiction, Fact And Form' by Ira Bruce Nadel is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is 'biography: Fiction, Fact And Form' about?

Nadel's central point is that biography ought to be more fictional: the solution to the dilemma of mimesis versus invention in biography may yet be through 'creative fact'. Virginia Woolf's term is not the impurity of fact but a near oxymoron recognizing the confusion, complexity and disorder of our lives and the determination not to make a biographical life a falsely ordered world. It is the response of biography to the kinds of perceptions modern literature has been grappling with since the late nineteenth century and a way of transforming biography into art via the imagination of the biographer. The result, often at the sacrifice of historical fact, is the establishment of an 'authorized fiction', an imaginative presentation of detail based on the understanding of the biographer of how his subject lived, psychologically and physically. Such a biography may sacrifice detail and, possibly, accuracy but not truth. Put another way, factual biographies are bad in the sense that they are dated, and so do not reflect our current understanding of reality

Author

Ira Bruce Nadel

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan Springer [distributor

Published

1984

Language

EN

ISBN

9780333426449

Subjects

Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Literary Fiction