Abstract
Most discussions of literary property amongst biographers are concerned with practical questions, such as how to gain access to people, manuscripts, and letters, and the legal status of such activities and materials. Biographers routinely compare themselves to burglars, detectives, explorers, or authorised guests touring a stately home (even if with burglary secretly in mind). All of these metaphors assume that an analogy can be drawn between books, someone’s personality or reputation, and various kinds of property — land, housing, or other artefacts — which can be owned by individuals and institutions, and are subject to a nation’s laws and statutes (the laws of libel, trespass, patent, copyright, and so on). At the same time, most biographers are aware that the notion of a fixed identity ‘out there’, to be explored, transgressed, protected, or owned, is at best a convenient shorthand. It is certainly economical with the truth, for one of the key fascinations of biography lies in the interplay it offers between the continuity of its subject’s individual body and his or her personal identity, that same individual’s knowledge and experience of continual change and adaptation, and the efforts of the biographer, through research and narrative, to re-imagine and interpret this experience afresh.
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Notes
Paul Eggert, ‘Opening Up the Text: The Case of Sons and Lovers’, in Rethinking Lawrence, ed. Keith Brown (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990), pp. 38–52 (p. 40).
See also Thomas Tanselle, ‘Textual Criticism and Deconstruction’, Studies in Bibliography, 43 (1989), pp. 1–33, for a discussion of the dangers that occur when literary theorists ignore the fact that reading texts are in part created by editors.
Anne Fernihough, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 73.
Janice Hubbard Harris, The Short Fiction of D. H. Lawrence (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), p. 3.
For further discussion of these matters, see David Saunders, ‘Approaches to the Historical Relations of the Legal and the Aesthetic’, New Literary History, 23: 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 505–21, and
his book Authorship and Copyright (London: Routledge, 1992).
Simon Gatrell, Hardy the Creator: A Textual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
Jacques Catteau, Dostoyevsky and the Process of Literary Creation, trans. Audrey Littlewood (Paris: Institut d’études slaves, 1978; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 4.
See Nancy K. Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 9–16, for further discussion of the distinctive characteristics of chaotic systems.
Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World (London: Viking, 1994), pp. 23–4.
See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Gattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massume (1980; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 7.
Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, Paris 1900–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); and
Martin Green, The Von Richthofen Sisters: Else and Frieda von Richthofen, Otto Gross, Max Weber, and D. H. Lawrence, in the years 1870–1970 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974).
See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
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© 1998 Antony Atkins
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Atkins, A. (1998). Textual Biography: Writing the Lives of Books. In: Gould, W., Staley, T.F. (eds) Writing the Lives of Writers. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26548-0_19
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