Vignettes

Leavis, biography and the body

Ian MacKillop

pp. 293-301

in: Warwick Gould, Thomas F. Staley (eds), Writing the lives of writers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998

Abstract

"More matter and less art." In this paper I shall make a seemingly contradictory suggestion for the biographer: to use more matter and more art — or rather different art, art different from that to which we are accustomed in late twentieth-century literary biography, a phrase happily avoided in the name of our conference. I want to suggest that there is a rather crude sort of art, the vignette, not so popular with literary biographers, which can vitalise biography. But before turning to art, a word about matter.

Cited authors

Leavis F. R.