How new is the new biography? Some remarks on the misleading term’s past and present

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to outline the phenomena which tend to be subsumed under the term of “new biography”, especially in the English-speaking discourse in the British Isles and the USA. This is due to the fact that, as it turns out, theorists and practitioners of biographical writing apply the designation to several different phenomena. In order to characterize the tenets of new biographical writing, the paper introduces the essence of the classical biography, which constitute a natural point of reference for the “new biography”. The latter emerged in 1918 with the English modernist Lytton Strachey, who opposed the fossilized Victorian tradition and its flagship model of panegyrical biography. Strachey effected a breakthrough in European biographical writing, by creating biographies which demythicized their protagonists, approaching them with an ironic distance and highlighting the biographer within the narrative. His model would soon become a new standard in  biographical writing. Another “new biography” discussed in the paper is the set of biography rules presented by Leon Edel in 1984, to which the originator refers as “New Biography”, a term he also applies to the biographies he authored. Still, Edel drew to a large extent on Strachey, attaching particular importance to the predisposition and talent of the biographer themselves. The latter’s contribution to a “new biography” consists chiefly in identifying and relating the “most profound” truths about the life of the protagonists, which provide a key to the understanding and narrative portrayal of their character and personality. The last of the biographical scholars discussed in the paper, Jo Burr Margadant, does not continue in the Stracheyan or Edelian spirit in her 2000 The New Biography but unfolds a novel, feminist perspective on biography, founded on the concept of multiple selves. She argues that that one’s identity is a kind of performance, and seeks that “new biography” in the narratives of life of eight eminent French female figures of the 18^th century. Still,  in the contemporary scholarly discourse relating to biographical writing, “new biography” is most often used as reference to the Stracheyan model, even though  a century has passed since it was conceived. At the same, time, biofiction gains ever greater popularity in biographical writing today, being in my opinion the “new biography” of the postmodern era, which I demonstrate using a number of examples.