Biography in literature

When studying literature, biography and its relationship to literature is often a subject of literary criticism, and is treated in several different forms. Two scholarly approaches use biography or biographical approaches to the past as a tool for interpreting literature: literary biography and biographical criticism. Additionally, two genres of fiction rely heavily on the incorporation of biographical elements into their content, biographical fiction and autobiographical fiction.

A literary biography is the biographical exploration of the lives of writers and artists. Biographies about artists and writers are sometimes some of the most complicated forms of biography. Not only does the author of the biography have to write about the subject of the biography but also must incorporate discussion of the individual's literary works into the biography itself. Literary biographers must balance the weight of commentary on the individual works against the biographical content to create a coherent narrative. This balance is affected by the degree of biographical elements in an author's literary works. The close relationship between writers and their work relies on ideas that connect human psychology and literature and can be examined through psychoanalytic theory.

Literary biography tends to have a plethora of autobiographical sources. Elizabeth Longford, a biographer of Wilfrid Blunt, noted, "Writers are articulate and tend to leave eloquent source material which the biographer will be eager to use." However, some authors and artists go out of their way to discourage the writing of their biographies, as was the case with Kafka, Eliot, Orwell and Auden. Auden said, "Biographies of writers whether written by others or themselves are always superfluous and usually in bad taste.... His private life is, or should be, of no concern to anybody except himself, his family and his friends."

Well-received literary biographies include Richard Ellmann's James Joyce and George Painter's Marcel Proust.

Biographical criticism is the deliberate use of biographical information to shed light on the difference created by experience between an author and his audience, and so provide insight into how to understand that particular work.

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