This textbook is an anthology of significant theoretical discussions of biography as a genre and as a literary-historical practice. Covering the 18th to the 21st centuries, the reader includes programmatic texts by authors such as Herder, Carlyle, Dilthey, Proust, Freud, Kracauer, Woolf and Bourdieu. Each text is accompanied by a commentary placing its contribution in critical context. Ideal for use in undergraduate seminars, this reader may also be of interest for academic researchers in the areas of literary studies and history aiming to get an overview of historical questions in biographical theory. This revised and updated English language edition also includes new translations of texts by J. G. Herder and Stefan Zweig, as well as an introductory discussion on the possibility of a ‘theory of biography’. Note: Due to copyright reasons, the chapter "Sade, Fourier, Loyola [Extract] (1971)" (pp. 175–177) by Roland Barthes could not be included in the ebook.

Scottish writer THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881) is perhaps best remembered today for dubbing economics "the dismal science," but in his day he was widely known-and often controversial-for his criticism of the "progress" of the Industrial Revolution, for his satires in the vein of Jonathan Swift, and for his championing of German Romantic poetry to English readers.This 1841 volume collects six of Carlyle's lectures on heroes, which offered a damning critique of the rising faceless corporatism and the denigration of the individual that the Industrial Revolution was promoting. Honoring the power of great men to change history, Carlyle discusses: The hero as divinity: Odin, Paganism, and Scandinavian mythology The hero as prophet: Mahomet and Islam The hero as poet: Dante and Shakespeare The hero as priest: Luther, Reformation by Knox, and Puritanism The hero as man of letters: Johnson, Rousseau, and Burns The hero as king: Cromwell, Napoleon, and modern revolutionism