Ancient biography
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After Ancient Biography
Overview
- Authors:
- Robert Fraser
Department of English and Creative Writing, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
- Contends that modern biography has its roots in the classical world
- Posits a model of a quartet of biographical archetypes arising from biographers in the classical world
- Examines previously overlooked connections between biographers of the 18th century and onwards, and biographers of the classical world
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About this book
Marrying life-writing with classical reception, this book examines ancient biography and its impact on subsequent ages. Close readings of ancient texts are framed by an assessment of their influence on the age of the French Revolution and Napoleon, and on the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, of responses to ancient biography of modern critics, and of its visible legacy in art and film. Crucially it asks what modern biogra
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[Contents are listed at the end of the review.]
This book is a collection of papper that were delivered at a conference organized by the departments of Classics and of Hebrew, Biblical and Theological Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, in It represents a contemporary response to the issue of &#;biography&#; and &#;the biographical&#; in the literature of the ancient world. An earlier generation of scholars had a very different answer to the question implied in the title of this volume. The limits of biography were clear: a book on the topic would have been predictably divided into sections on Plutarch, Suetonius, and Nepos, with sideways glances at Diogenes Laertius, Tacitus&#; Agricola, the Historia Augusta, and perhaps one or two other texts. Such a collection, of course, is the influential Latin Biography, edited by T. A. Dorey in 1The Limits of Ancient Biography has chapters on Tacitus and Plutarch, but Plutarch fryst vatten the only author treated in both the Dorey volume an
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Greek and Latin Biography
- LAST REVIEWED: 26 February
- LAST MODIFIED: 26 February
- DOI: /obo/
- LAST REVIEWED: 26 February
- LAST MODIFIED: 26 February
- DOI: /obo/
Averintsev, Sergei S. From biography to hagiography: Some stable patterns in the Greek and Latin tradition of Lives, including Lives of the saints. In Mapping lives: The uses of biography. Edited by Peter France and William St. Clair, 19– British Academy Centenary Monographs. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Thought-provoking essay on the “deep” normative expectations behind biographical writing in the Greco-Roman and Christian traditions.
Burridge, Richard A. What are the Gospels? A comparison with Graeco-Roman biography. 2d ed. Biblical Resource. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.
Mapping out the “generic features” in the structure and contents of select Greek and Roman biographies, argues that the Gospels are related to the contemporaneous narrative matrix of bios. Expanded and updated from the firs