Elisabeth Chaghafi introduces English Literary Afterlives

Posted by Bethan Hirst - Tuesday, 29 Mar 2022

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If you were to pick up any biography of an author of literary fiction today, you would expect to find that author’s works referenced in some way – and normally that expectation would be fulfilled. The degree of prominence given to the works in the biography and the context in which they feature might vary, of course, depending on what the specific biographer was trying to achieve, but it is nearly impossible to imagine a biography of Shakespeare or Sidney (or any other author, really) that never once mentions any of their major works or attempts to say something about how, when or why they were written. That is because we live in an age in which the assumption that there is a connection between life and literary output (even if the precise nature and significance of that connection is open to some debate) has become so fundamental for literary biography and literary criticism that we take it for granted and only consciously notice it in its more extreme forms, such as 19th-century ‘biographical criticism’.

The assumption that making a connection between the life and works of an author is crucial for understanding either did not always exist, however. One of the problems that biographers of early modern authors face is that what early biographical records and narratives there are about those authors rarely say anything about their works, which are treated as they existed on a separate plane. So the first biographical accounts of Sir Philip Sidney, for example, were exclusively concerned with his public life and glossed over his works as insignificant. At the other extreme, the prefatory materials to the (posthumous) first folio edition of Shakespeare’s works are exclusively concerned with Shakespeare the author and betray little interest in Shakespeare the man.

In focusing on the posthumous careers of dead authors and demonstrating how they were shaped through, English Literary Afterlives offers a counter-narrative to the established idea that early modern authors primarily ‘fashioned’ themselves during their own life-time. English Literary Afterlives traces the beginnings of the modern belief in a connection between the life and the works by examining at the posthumous reception of early modern authors among their contemporaries and near-contemporaries. I propose that although early readers were less interested than we are in finding biographical narratives that explain or illuminate the works, an author’s body of works became much more central to the way in which they thought of them once that author was dead. A particularly interesting example of this phenomenon is Robert Greene, after whose death in 1592 several rival publishers claimed to be putting his final work into print, each of which posthumously put a different spin on his career as one of the first professional writers. At the other end of the early modern period, Izaak Walton one of the first professional biographers in English, pioneered a type of biography in which he attempted to reconstruct the autobiographical voices of John Donne and George Herbert from their poetic works. Although Walton’s approach (which among other things involves the appropriation, modification, and even the invention, of quotes) now seems dubious and unscholarly, it was in fact very innovative in the late seventeenth century and indirectly laid the foundations for modern literary biography in English.

My book, then, has two main purposes: the first is to show what a crucial role the notion of the ‘complete’ author, whose works can be convincingly integrated into a coherent life-narrative, has played in the development of both literary biography and literary criticism (which is why both changes to that life-narrative  and changes to the body of works via new attributions are still felt to matter, even though we tend to believe we have moved beyond the stage of naively equating authors with their works). The second is to showcase the acts of creativity through which some early readers of early modern English authors were able to find ways of considering authors’ lives in the light of their body works once both had been completed through the author’s death.

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