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2 results

  • Chapter 7 - Constructing Virgil and His Biography

  • from Part II - Lives and Afterlives
  • Edited by Giacomo Fedeli, University of Exeter, Henry Spelman, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Writing Literary History in the Greek and Roman World
    Published online:
    07 June 2024
    Print publication:
    27 June 2024, pp 144-166

  • Summary

    Virgil’s is the only literary biography whose development, from the early Imperial Age to Late Antiquity and beyond, we can examine. It was largely constructed through inferences drawn from the author’s works, selected on the basis of their reception and according to the cultural characteristics of different ages of reception. The biography was adapted to school teaching, particularly in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, but it was also influenced by the critical interpretation of Virgil, which variously modified the image and the evaluation of the poet.

  • 14 - Life Writing

  • from Part II - Prose Genres
  • Edited by Daniel Tyler, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Prose
    Published online:
    05 November 2021
    Print publication:
    18 November 2021, pp 233-246

  • Summary

    Whether in biography, the biographical novel, the memoir or various other subgenres of life writing, the writer must be responsibly committed to both truth and imagination, to both fact and fiction. Jay Parini’s chapter considers a wide range of life writing and observes the various priorities afforded to truth and imagination in the work. Whatever access to archives, testimonies and evidence life writers need, they need above all, in Parini’s phrase, ‘access to the resources of language’.