Title: Philosophical Biography (1): Godwin’s Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft
Abstract: As we have seen, the presentation of the melancholy of writers in literary biographies from the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth centuries offered only limited insight into the inner life. Boswell's fascination with his own psychology did not extend — would not have presumed to extend — to an exploration of Johnson's interior world. Indeed, as his metaphor of the Coliseum shows, Boswell was keen to protect the mystery of his hero. And even had he hoped to offer more penetrating insight into Johnson's sufferings, his attempts to elicit revelations of this nature met with failure. At the same time, building on Mason's innovatory use of letters in biography, and his own ability to reconstitute dialogue, Boswell offered a literary portrait of unrivalled vividness. Thanks largely to him, a new form of full-length, anecdotal literary biography was recognised as a distinct and significant genre. 'From that time a new spirit animated all this department of composition,' the biographer John Gibson Lockhart was to write in 1836, adding 'and to the influence of Boswell we owe probably three-fourths of what is de facto most entertaining, as well as no inconsiderable portion of whatever is instructive, in all books of memoirs that have subsequently appeared.'1 KeywordsFrench RevolutionMoral ConsciousnessRomantic PeriodLove AffairPersonal SufferingThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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