A Companion to Literary Biography offers a comprehensive account of literary biography spanning the history of the genre across three centuries.

Table of Contents

• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• The History of Literary Biography
• The Emergence of Literary Biography
• Lasting First Impressions: On the Origins of Ambivalent Attitudes to the Lake Poets, Cockney Keats, and Satanic Shelley
• How to Be an Author: Victorian Literary Biography c. 1830–1880
• Un/making the Victorians: Literary Biography, 1880–1930
• “Aerial Creations of the Poets”? New Biography and the BBC in the 1930s
• Literary Biography in the Twentieth Century
• Issues, Theories, and Methodologies
• Ethics and Literary Biography
• Concerns about Facts and Form in Literary Biography
• Women with a Theory: Feminism and Biography
• The Role of Diaries in the Development of Literary Biography
• Blurred Boundaries: Literary Biography, Literary Autobiography, and Evidence
• Reading and Interpreting: The Archival Legacies of Canadian Women Writers
• Johnny and Bess: Life Writing and Gender
• “The Man's Life in the Letters of the Man”: Larkin, Letters, and Literary Biography
• J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Style in Autobiography
• The Experience of Archives: Richmal Crompton and Others
• Disappearing into the Front Page: The Case of Salman Rushdie and the Postmodern Memoir
• Evidence and Invention: The Materials of Literary Biography
• Mustabeens and Mightabeens: The Unknowability of English Renaissance Playwrights
• Literary Biography, Literary Studies, and Theory: An Uneasy Relationship
• Estate Management: Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark
• Classic Cases
• Chaucer
• Writing Shakespeare's Life
• John Donne
• Jonathan Swift
• Life and Death in the Literary Biographies of Pope and His Circle
• Richardson and Fielding
• Biography as Myth-Making: Obfuscation and Invention in Victorian and Post-Victorian Literary Biography
• Dickens, Tennyson, Kipling
• Would the Real Mr. Eliot Please Stand Up?
• After Ellmann: The State of Joyce Biography
• Literary Biography and the De-Canonization of Amy Lowell
• Reviewing the Lives and Works of Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis