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THE LIFE-HISTORIES AND THEIR RELEVANCE
The sixth category, Ficiton presented as Biography, is outright fiction. It is only technically a biography. It has enjoyed great success. Such works imaginatively take the place of biography where there can be no genuine life writing. Fielding's Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones and Carlyle's Sartor Resartus may be cited as examples of this type. The writer makes the reader feel that what he reads is a real life-story. But both the writer and the reader know that the feeling is a literary illusion. The technique of such writing may be often autobiographical as in Jane Eyre, Robert Grave's I, Claudius and Manohar Malgonkar's The Devil's Wind.
Moreover, there is a large class of works which might be called "specialpurpose" biography. In such works, the art of biography becomes the servant of other interests. This category contains potboilers written as propaganda or as a scandalous expose, campaign biographies aimed at promoting the cause of a political candidate, commemorative volumes commissioned by widows and also pious works which are known as hagiography written to edify the reader.
The object of this chapter is not to present an accurate and exhaustive information on biography as a literary genre. But enough has to be stated to show how variously this form has flourished and how Dilip Roy's practice partly resembles the existing practices and largely differs from them all.
Autobiography is in a way, a branch of biography. As it is dealt with at length in Chapter IX of this thesis, it is not necssary to elaborately write about it here.
Notes :
1. B. Prasad, A Background to the Study of English Literature, 3rd ed. (Madras: Macmillan
India Ltd. 1955), p. 167, 2. J. A. Cuddon. A Dictionary of Literary Terms (Delhi: Clarion Books, 1980), p. 299. 3. Paul) Murray) K(endall) "Biographical Literature," Encyclopaedia Britanica,
1985, XXIII, 202. 4. C. Vijayasree. "Indian Biography in English." Indian Journal of Amarican Studies,
XXVII, No. 2 (1997), 12. 5. Quoted in Jeffrey Meyers, ed. The Craft of Literary Biography (London: Macmillan
Press Ltd., 1985), p. 2. 6. Alan Shelston, Biography, The Critical Idiom (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1977). pp.
33-34. (Bracket mine) 7. Waldo H. Dunn, English Biography (New York:E. P. Dutton & Co., 1916). pp. 232-33. 8. Meyers, ed. The Craft of Literary Biography, p. I. 9. Encylopaedia Britanica, XXIII, 196. 10. Ibid. pp. 196-98.
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