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Anecdotal Death
| Content Provider | Scilit |
|---|---|
| Author | Davies, Laura |
| Copyright Year | 2020 |
| Description | No “species of writing” is “more delightful or more useful” than biography (Johnson, Rambler III.60.319). From the short pieces written for the Gentleman's Magazine during the late 1730s to the essays that came to be known as The Lives of the English Poets (1779–81), Johnson remained committed to the genre.$ ^{1}$ Rather than merely presenting a “formal and studied narrative” from “pedigree” to “death” via a “chronological series of actions or preferments,” he held that the biographer should attend to “the minute details of daily life” in order to reveal the character of the subject and to allow the reader – by an act of imaginative identification “placing us, for a time, in the condition of him whose fortune we contemplate” – to share in their experiences: “so that we feel, while the deception lasts, whatever motions would be excited by the same good or evil happening to ourselves” (Rambler III.60.319). Yet Johnson also considered biography almost impossible to write satisfactorily. Judging most to be “barren and useless,” he asserted that, the weaknesses of many biographers notwithstanding, “the incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition.” Consequently, there is no point or perspective from which biographers can properly record their subjects. Either the writing of a 'Life' is “delayed” to produce “impartiality,” with the result that it contains little “intelligence” or, “if a biographer writes from personal knowledge,” there is a “danger lest his interest, his fear, his gratitude, or his tenderness, overpower his fidelity” (Rambler III.60.319). Book Name: The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature |
| Related Links | https://api.taylorfrancis.com/content/chapters/edit/download?identifierName=doi&identifierValue=10.4324/9781003107040-28&type=chapterpdf |
| Ending Page | 318 |
| Page Count | 12 |
| Starting Page | 307 |
| DOI | 10.4324/9781003107040-28 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited |
| Publisher Date | 2020-12-07 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Book Name: The Routledge Companion To Death and Literature Cultural Studies Narratives Anecdotal Johnson's History Historiographical Attempts William |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Chapter |
