Literary Biography
- Biography (Gale in Context) This link opens in a new window Biography In Context offers biographical information about historically significant figures as well as present-day newsmakers. It includes reference content alongside magazine and journal articles, primary sources, videos, audio podcasts, and images.
- Contemporary Authors This link opens in a new window A bio-bibliographical guide to current writers in fiction, general nonfiction, poetry, journalism, drama, motion pictures, television, and other fields.
- Literature Online (LION) This link opens in a new window LION includes texts, criticism, and reference material, including thousands of literary articles, essays, biographies and encyclopedia entries on over 350,000 works of poetry, prose, and drama from the 8th to the 21st century.
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography This link opens in a new window The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is the national record of men and women who have shaped British history and culture, worldwide, from the Romans to the 21st century." Does not include living people or those recently deceased.
New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and their families by
Novelist and critic Colm Tóibín provides "a fascinating exploration of writers and their families" (Entertainment Weekly) and "an excellent guide through the dark terrain of unconscious desires" (The Evening Standard) in this brilliant collection of essays that explore the relationships of writers to their families and their work. Colm Tóibín--celebrated both for his award-winning fiction and his provocative book reviews and essays--traces the intriguing, often twisted family ties of writers in the books they leave behind. Through the relationship between W. B. Yeats and his father, Thomas Mann and his children, Jane Austen and her aunts, and Tennessee Williams and his sister, Tóibín examines a world of relations, richly comic or savage in their implications. Acutely perceptive and imbued with rare tenderness and wit, New Ways to Kill Your Mother is a fascinating look at writers' most influential bonds and a secret key to understanding and enjoying their work.
Location: Mugar Stacks PN466 .T57 2012Publication Date: 2013
Oscar Wilde in Context by
Oscar Wilde was a courageous individualist whose path-breaking life and work were shaped in the crucible of his time and place, deeply marked by the controversies of his era. This collection of concise and illuminating articles reveals the complex relationship between Wilde's work and ideas, and contemporary contexts including Victorian feminism, aestheticism and socialism. Chapters investigate how Wilde's writing was both a resistance to and quotation of Victorian master narratives and genre codes. From performance history to film and operatic adaptations, the ongoing influence and reception of Wilde's story and work is explored, proposing not one but many Oscar Wildes. To approach the meaning of Wilde as an artist and historical figure, the book emphasises not only his ability to imagine new worlds, but also his bond to the turbulent cultural and historical landscape around him - the context within which his life and art took shape.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2013
Samuel Beckett by
Writer Samuel Beckett (1906-89) is known for depicting a world of abject misery, failure, and absurdity in his many plays, novels, short stories, and poetry. Yet the despair in his work is never absolute, instead it is intertwined with black humor and an indomitable will to endure--characteristics best embodied by his most famous characters, Vladimir and Estragon, in the play Waiting for Godot. Beckett himself was a supremely modern, minimalist writer who deeply distrusted biographies and resisted letting himself be pigeonholed by easy interpretation or single definition. Andrew Gibson's accessible critical biography overcomes Beckett's reticence and carefully considers the writer's work in relation to the historical circumstances of his life. In Samuel Beckett, Gibson tracks Beckett from Ireland after independence to Paris in the late 1920s, from London in the '30s to Nazi Germany and Vichy France, and finally through the cold war to the fall of communism in the late '80s. Gibson narrates the progression of Beckett's life as a writer--from a student in Ireland to the 1969 Nobel Prize winner for literature--through chapters that examine individual historical events and the works that grew out of those experiences. A notoriously private figure, Beckett sought refuge from life in his work, where he expressed his disdain for the suffering and unnecessary absurdity of much that he witnessed. This concise and engaging biography provides an essential understanding of Beckett's work in response to many of the most significant events of the past century.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2009
W. B. Yeats: A New Biography by
Half a century ago, Norman Jeffares wrote the definitive biography of W.B. Yeats, which was subsequently published in a revised edition in 1990 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the poet's death. The present volume, a re-issue of the 1990 edition with a new introduction and bibliography, is an account of Yeats's life and work, together with a fascinating collection of letters, photographs and poetry.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2001
Eavan Boland by
In this powerful and authoritative study Jody Allen Randolph provides the fullest account yet of the work of a major figure in twentieth-century Irish literature as well as in contemporary women's writing. Eavan Boland's achievement in changing the map of Irish poetry is tracked and analyzed from her first poems to the present. The book traces the evolution of that achievement, guiding the reader through Boland's early attachment to Yeats, her growing unease with the absence of women's writing, her encounter with pioneering American poets like Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich, and her eventual, challenging amendments in poetry and prose to Ireland's poetic tradition. Using research from private papers the book also traces a time of upheaval and change in Ireland, exploring Boland's connection to Mary Robinson, in a chapter that details the nexus of a woman president and a woman poet in a country that was resistant to both. Finally, this book invites the reader to share a compelling perspective on the growth of a poet described by one critic as Ireland's "first great woman poet."
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2013
Background Sources
- Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new window Oxford Art Online is the access point for Grove Art Online, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and The Oxford Companion to Western Art.
- Oxford Reference This link opens in a new window Published by Oxford University Press, it is a fully-indexed, cross-searchable database containing dictionaries, language reference and subject reference works.
- Cambridge Companions Complete Collection This link opens in a new window The Cambridge Companions present collections of essays written by leading experts in the field on themes, subjects, and key figures in three broad areas: Literature and Classics; Philosophy, Religion, and Culture; and Music.
- Encyclopedia of Popular Music This link opens in a new window With content current through 2006, the entries begin coverage ca. 1900 with articles on people, bands, trends, festivals, albums, and the recording industry at large. Genres include jazz, country, folk, rap, reggae, rock, techno, and musicals to world music. Articles contain excellent cross-referencing, useful discographies and core bibliography.
Creative Writing
Librarian
Barbara Maratos
Contact:
Boston University Libraries
bkmarato@bu.edu
bkmarato@bu.edu
Subjects: Language & Linguistics, Literature