Biographical criticism

Biographical criticism is a form of literary criticism which analyzes a writer's biography to show the relationship between the author's life and their works of literature.[2] Biographical criticism is often associated with historical-biographical criticism,[3] a critical method that "sees a literary work chiefly, if not exclusively, as a reflection of its author's life and times".[4]

This longstanding critical method dates back at least to the Renaissance period,[5] and was employed extensively by Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets (1779–81).[6]

Like any critical methodology, biographical criticism can be used with discretion and insight or employed as a superficial shortcut to understanding the literary work on its own terms through such strategies as Formalism. Hence 19th century biographical criticism came under disapproval by the so-called New Critics of the 1920s, who coined the term "biographical fallacy"[7][8] to describe criticism that neglected the imaginative genesis of literature.

Notwithstanding this critique, biographical criticism remained a significant mode of literary inquiry throughout the 20th century, particularly in studies of Charles Dickens and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. The method continues to be employed in the study of such authors as John Steinbeck,[2] Walt Whitman[3] and William Shakespeare.[9]