Academic literature on the topic 'Biographical author (empirical author)'

This thesis explores the effect produced when contemporary novelists write about fellow authors. Since the mid-1990s, the biographical novel, which fictionalises the lives of real-life historical authors, has become an increasingly popular literary genre in Britain and the United States. This contemporary exploration of authorial subjectivity, viewed here through the lens of life-writing, provides a reengagement with debates surrounding the crisis of the author-figure (exemplified by Roland Barthes), and the unreliability of biography as a discourse of subjectivity at the turn of the twenty-first century. Through its inherent self-reflexivity (with its exposure of both the author-biographer alongside the author-subject), I consider how the biographical novel succeeds in reconciling the author-figure with the literary text in new ways. While critical interest in the biographical novel has tended to focus on a limited number of texts, little attention has been paid to their status as an emergent sub-genre of life-writing. Through the exemplary figures of Sylvia Plath, Henry James and Virginia Woolf and their corresponding biographical novels, I draw together a core body of texts to demonstrate their unity as a literary form. With an emphasis upon the role of life-writing in the construction of authorial subjectivity, I consider how each of the three author-subjects have cultivated — and been cultivated by — particular recurrent motifs: firstly through their own texts (whether fictional or biographical), then as they become manifest once again in the writing of the contemporary biographical novelists. Modernist developments in biographical modes, particularly Woolf's revision of the relationship between the biographer and his or her subject, provide both context for the biographical novel, and a rich framework upon which to build contemporary forms of life-writing and authorial subjectivity. Taking these as a starting point through which to view the 'author question', my thesis reveals how the genre of the biographical novel offers a redefinition of both the author as a multiple, progressive and changing figure, and a highlighting how the reinterpretation of life-writing in fictional form both enhances and supports the future of biography and autobiography as an equally evolutionary form.

This thesis investigates the life and work of Edward Baines, editor of the Leeds Mercury from 1801 to 1848 and Member of Parliament for Leeds from 1834 to 1841. It considers his political, journalistic and literary achievements and it investigates why no authoritative complete study of his life has been carried out since his son's filial biography written in 1851. The thesis examines the confusion which has arisen because Edward Baines Senior and Junior were both journalists editing the Leeds Mercury, both campaigning Dissenters, both Members of Parliament for Leeds and that much of their political and journalistic lives ran concurrently and not consecutively. Consideration is given to Baines's antecedents, his early years and the influences that helped shape his thinking. Baines's philosophy is examined, particularly as it was expressed in both his newspaper editorials and his academic writings. It shows that his fundamental beliefs were rooted in Protestant Christianity and how this was reflected in his views by his opposition to war and slavery, his lifelong support for individual freedom as expressed through Whig-Liberalism and the cause of Nonconformism. The thesis then follows a chronological approach. The years 1801 to 1815 witnessed his campaign on behalf of the merchants and manufacturers of the West Riding and the active political role he adopted from the election of 1807 onwards. The years 1815 to 1829 revealed Baines at the apotheosis of his journalistic career, with the revelations of the Government Spy scandal, his involvement in the campaigns for Parliamentary Reform, the commencement of his literary career and the launch of his strategy to establish a Whig power base in Leeds by taking control of the Parish Church vestry. The years 1830 to 1841 demonstrated Baines as an active politician, becoming the Member for Leeds and using his parliamentary position to campaign for the rights of the Dissenters. His final years 1841 to 1848 showed him still active in politics locally; an examination is also made of his final commitment to evangelical Congregationalism. Primary source material has been used throughout to illustrate Baines, his beliefs and the views his contemporaries held of him. Although few manuscript primary sources are available a considerable amount of printed primary source material is to be found in Baines's books and almost fifty years of his LessisMercury. The newspapers of his opponents, which cover the same period, offer a diverse range of views on the man and these enable a more balanced view of him to be reached than that found in his son's biography.

The work confronts prosaic pieces with noticeable autobiographical features. It deals namely with works of Edgar Dutka, Eliška Vlasáková and Antonín Bajaja. It was not a coincidence to choose right these three Czech authors. They have quite a few features in common. They all belong to the same generation. They are born in the 40's of the 20th century, so they have spent an essential part of their lives (childhood, adolescence and substantial part of their working age) in the second half of the 20th century - in the time of political convulsions and social changes. A childhood spent during this period has become their common literary theme. They all make their memories a literary piece. Each of them does it in a different way and with a different amount of accuracy. Their inspiration comes from their real life, from their memories. The next common feature of these three authors is that they all wrote some of their texts without a vision to make them public. They wrote them for themselves. Book editions were carried out after the year 2000. Last but not least mutual fact is that all of these three authors have been nominated for a prestigious literary price. Edgar Dutka's works show the interdigitation of fictional worlds and also the diffusion of these worlds in the real life of the author. Eliška...