Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic BiographerPantheon Books, 2000 - 420 páginas In 1985 Richard Holmes published a book called "Footsteps," and the writing of biography was changed forever. A daring mixture of travel, biographical sleuthing, and personal memoir, it broke all the conventions of the genre and remains one of the most intoxicating and magical works of modern literary investigation ever written. Now Holmes has put together a further and wonderfully revealing exploration of his biographical methods. "Sidetracks" is his personal casebook, assembled from decades of "wanderings from the straight and narrow" of his major biographies. It is a renewed examination of the strange and sometimes shadowy pathways of biography that have always fascinated him. "This is the fragmented tale of a single biographical quest," says Holmes, "a thirty-year journey in search of the perfect Romantic subject and the form to fit it." Sidetracks pursues this quest through an extraordinary and eclectic assortment of Romantic and Gothic writers and personalities--French, English, Dutch, and American, some major, some minor, but all made hypnotically alive and memorable through Holmes's transforming touch. We meet Chatterton and de Nerval, Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin, James Boswell and Robert Louis Stevenson, Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda. With each of these twenty pieces Holmes shows how fluid, playful, and unconstrained the many voices of biography can be. The collection is held together by a subtle autobiographical thread: "To be sidetracked is, after all, to be led astray by a path or an idea, a scent or a tune, and maybe lost forever." |
Contenido
Introduction | 3 |
Introduction | 53 |
Gautier in London 1975 | 67 |
Derechos de autor | |
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Términos y frases comunes
Barham beautiful became began biographer boat Boswell Boswell's Bristol Byron café Calais Casa Magni Catcott Chatterton Coleridge dancing dark death Deburau dream Dutch emotional English eyes father feeling finally Fitzgerald France French Gautier Gérard Gérard de Nerval ghost Gilbert Imlay Godwin Gothenburg heart HOLMES human imagination Imlay intellectual James's Jane Johnson kind later laughter letters Lisle Lisle's literary lived London looking Madame Geelvinck Mary Wollstonecraft Maturin Melmoth Memoirs Micromégas Mill mind Nadar Nerval never night novel Paris passion perhaps philosopher piece Pierrot poem poet poetry published Romantic round Rowley Scandinavia Scrope seemed sense Shelley Shelley's spirit St Mary Redcliff story strange Street suicide Théophile Gautier thing Thomas Thomas Chatterton Thomas Rowley thou thought took Trelawny Utrecht Voltaire Voltaire's walked Warehorne William William Canynges William Godwin woman write wrote young Zélide Zuylen