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There could be different ways of writing biographies, just as there are different kinds of novels. Modern biographers who are sensitive to the trends in fiction and criticism may avoid the chronological approach, as it is often seen as old-fashioned. They may prefer a more subtle kind of structuring; for instance, Hermione Lee, who wrote Virginia Woolf's life, argued that there are several ways in which a ‘Life’ may begin apart from the start of the subject's birth. Likewise, Jean Sartre asserted the need to use an inverted chronology wherein regression should come first before progress can be properly grounded. This chapter discusses the chronological biography and, in particular, strict chronological biography. First, it examines D.H. Lawrence's biography, which is arranged and structured chronologically, and considers two biographies that are arranged in innovatory ways: Sartre's biography of Flaubert and Lee's narrative of Virginia Woolf. While Sartre and Lee's methods were interesting, the chronological approach, however old-fashioned, has positive aspects: it allows miming of the reader of how a life may have felt to live; throws emphasis on the experience of the biographee rather than commentary of the biographer; allows the reader to watch the life as it unfolds rather than having its significance anticipated; and delays verdicts until there has been sufficient exploration of the process and development.

This chapter focuses on the British modernist whose work represents the most sustained fictionalising engagement with biography. It recounts changes in biographical theory in Woolf's lifetime; especially her father's Dictionary of National Biography; the influence of Freud on Bloomsbury; Woolf's own critical discussions of biography; and New Criticism's antagonism to biographical interpretation; though it also draws on recent biographical criticism of Woolf. It discusses Jacob's Room and Flush, but concentrates on Orlando, arguing that it draws on the notions of imaginary and composite portraits discussed earlier. Whereas Orlando is often read as a ‘debunking’ of an obtuse biographer‐narrator, it shows how Woolf's aims are much more complex. First, the book's historical range is alert to the historical development of biography; and that the narrator is no more fixed than Orlando, but transforms with each epoch. Second, towards the ending the narrator begins to sound curiously like Lytton Strachey, himself the arch‐debunker of Victorian biographical piety. Thus Orlando is read as both example and parody of what Woolf called ‘The New Biography’. The chapter reads Woolf in parallel with Harold Nicolson's The Development of English Biography, and also his book Some People—a text whose imaginary (self)portraiture provoked her discussion of ‘The New Biography’ as well as contributing to the conception of Orlando.

After highlighting the growing role of literacy and the mass-dissemination of standardized texts in popular Hindu practice, this chapter turns to the importance of Hanuman in the Hindi devotional poetry attributed to the influential 16th-17th century saint-poet Tulsidas, author of the epic Ramcaritmanas and one of the great figures of bhakti literature. It then surveys a body of allegedly esoteric tantra literature that promotes Hanuman's ritual worship as an efficacious, boon-granting deity. Finally, it introduces and discusses the implications of a collection of exuberant late-20th century narratives that construct an elaborate “biography” (or in two cases, an autobiography) of Hanuman, making him the central hero in his own epic-like cycle.

This chapter provides an overview of the evidence regarding al-Kindī’s biography, and surveys what is known of his writings based on the account in Ibn al-Nadīm’s Fihrist. While most of his works are lost, there is a significant extant corpus which is also summarized here. The chapter discusses how al-Kindī’s writings relate to the translation movement under the ’Abbāsids, which produced Arabic versions of Greek philosophical and scientific works. It concludes by considering al-Kindī’s legacy, among Neoplatonic philosophers who followed his broad approach (such as al-’Āmirī and Miskawayh), contrasting this “Kindian tradition” to the more Aristotelian school in Baghdad, whose most famous representative was al-Fārābī.

Helen House, the first hospice for children in the UK, opened in Oxford in 1982. This book aims to provide a full and comprehensive account of how Helen House came into being, what it does, and how it operates. The last decade of the twentieth century saw a rapid growth in the number of children's hospices and corresponding important developments in the field of what has become known as paediatric palliative care. The book describes how Helen House arose from a special bond of friendship between Mother Frances Dominica and the author's daughter Helen, Jacqueline Worswick (the author), and her husband, Richard. It records how the idea for Helen House emerged and how this idea was then translated into reality. The book contains a brief biography of Frances and information about those others whose important contributions enabled Helen House to develop in the way it did.

This chapter discusses some of the trends in the twentieth century that have emerged in publications on how to write biographies, and emphasizes the trends of the past twenty years. Its focus is on English-language biography. It is suggested that one can understand the present debates as a rethinking of the suppositions of twentieth-century modernist biography.

By the end of the eighteenth century, European countries sought new functions for biographies. As the appetite and scope for more facts increased, and the need for reshaping them into a matter of national pride became the imperative, the writing of life found new models. This chapter discusses the formation of new models of Victorian biography. In the early nineteenth century, James Field Stanfield wrote a full-scale book on biography and Karl von Morgenstern coined the term Bidungsroman. Both formulated the terms in which biography and novel were to be in close proximity, both in likeness and difference. According to Stanfield, biography must assist in understanding the human character. It should aim to elucidate the range of human possibilities and to impart improvements in education and conduct. Stanfield argued that biography is a serious history wherein the historian is obliged to tell the truth, although at the same time there is a need for censorship in order to protect certain parts of the audience who should be edified by their reading. In these Victorian biographies, the aim was for the improvement of the individual and of the human race; hence certain latitude for the discussion of negative examples is allowed to impart moral illustrations. However, the dominant theme in Victorian biographies was negative representations of living persons. As the Victorian biographies dwindled, a new ideal form, Bidungsroman, unified the clash of unvarnished fact and edification, and closed the gap between novel and biography.

This chapter presents an overview of Milton's biographers from the earliest lives of the poet to the year 2000. The life of Milton has been a subject of quite a lot of accounts compared to other early modern English writers, due in part to the availability of early biographies by people who knew him; in part because of the towering status he enjoyed in the English canon despite attempts to unseat him; and in part because of his story, of poetic genius surrounding surviving political engagement, of resolution and moral courage overcoming great physical impairment. Biographers from Cyriak Skinner to Barbara Lewalski are discussed in the chapter, including the ebbs and flows of Milton biography and the ideological partiality among the biographers.

A narrative analysis of New Economy romanticism as a stylized genre of media hype reveals how the framing of celebrity business leaders folds individual personalities together with corporate structures in ways that mirror the persistent American confusion over the simultaneously private and public identity of the firm. Media coverage of Ted Turner, Bill Gates, and Jim Clark exhibits a progression away from traditional strategies for legitimizing corporate activity toward antimanagerialism — a romanticized assault on the legitimacy of powerful bureaucratic organizations that paradoxically legitimizes corporate power itself. This argument expands the notion of what counts as governance literature to include business biography and even pop culture narratives, and to embrace a range of broader cultural issues such as the challenge the corporation poses for the American liberal imagination, and the question of what it means to be a person in a corporate society.

This chapter discusses Freud and the art of biography. It discusses Freud's psychoanalysis, which took an important role in the structuring of biographies, and the role of writing of lives in clinical psychoanalysis. Although Freud understated the role that writing lives has had in clinical psychoanalysis, biographies nevertheless contributed to Freudian psychoanalysis. While they were initially seen from a different perspective, clinical psychoanalysis is, on the whole, closely related to biography, for the encounter between the ‘analysand’ and the analyst involves the writing and rewriting of a life history.

Humans who are governed by emotional states have the capacity to establish, develop, and retain different interpretations of the people familiar to them. Hence it is the part of the biographer to examine these untethered interpretations and create from them a portrait that will be identifiable from all angles. A biography cannot present a life in the unclear and multi-faceted form that is its familiar and daily form. A biography in this sense is therefore an illusion. This chapter discusses the challenge of shaping biographies. In it, possible flaws of the biographical genre, including the invasion of privacy to the delivery of truths to one's life story, are considered. The chapter also discusses the standard rules governing the biographer's manner of using confidential information or documents. Particular focus is on the ethics of biography, the rights and the wrongs of presentation of those to whom death affords little protection.

This chapter discusses some of the ways biography – including biographers, the reading and uses of biography, and the practices that represent gender – has treated the problem of women's appearances in public life. The author focuses the discussion on questions of reputation and influence.

Central to the chapter’s survey of emerging Jewish popular-music genres is the role of the city as a new cultural context for Jewish music making by the turn of the century. Immigrants from rural Eastern Europe, Jewish musicians entered all areas of the urban musical cultures of Vienna, Berlin, and other cities, where they performed for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences with enormous success. The city was also the site for mixing musical genres, creating new sounds in popular music and establishing new genres—for example, cabaret and Yiddish theater. The chapter analyzes numerous broadsides and hit songs such as Gustav Pick’s “Viennese Coachman’s Song.” Individual musicians, music publishers, and ensembles serve as a collective biography throughout the chapter.