Writing Lives: Principia Biographica

ISBN: 0393303829

Author: Edel, Leon

Condition: New

Leon Edel has brilliantly provided for the art of biography a much-needed statement of first principles. -Louis Auchincloss The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Henry James presents here a revision of his Literary Biography expanded with six further essays illuminating what he calls the New Biography-an approach that draws on the resources of psychoanalysis, the biographers own subjectivity, and the skills of the novelist. Mr. Edel includes a history of the art of biography since Boswell, criticism of some of the best-known biographers, advice for the biographer on documentation and the use of psychological theory, and a discussion of what Edel calls the supreme problem in biography-transference, the life-writers emotional involvement with his or her subject.