Towards a poetics of literary biography Drawing upon a wide range of biographies of literary subjects from Shakespeare and Wordsworth to William Golding and V.S. Naipaul this book develops a poetics of literary biography based on the triangular relationships of lives works and times and how narrative operates in holding them together. Biography is seen as a hybrid genre in which historical and fictional elements are imaginatively combined. It considers the roles of story telling factual data in the art of life writing and the literariness of its language. It includes a case study of the biography of Ellen Terry discussion of the controversial relationship between a subjects life and works biographical criticism and through the issue of gender the social and cultural changes biographies reflect. It frames a poetics on the basis of its strategy and tactics and demonstrates how the literal truth of verifiable data and the poetic truth of what is narrated are interdependent Machine generated contents note: Preface Introduction: Lives Without Theory 1. Art & Artifice in Biography 2. Plotting A Life 3. The Authors Works (1): Signs of Life 4. The Authors Works (2): Open to Criticism 5. Their Times and Ours 6. Framing a Poetics of Literary Biography