Reviews for English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Survey

The average rating for English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Survey based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-07-16 00:00:00 John Johansen This book should be required reading for all students of biography.  In lucid, engaging prose, Pritchard provides a compelling assessment of the literature in the century before Boswell and Johnson came to dominate the discussion of biography in English literature.  The author demonstrates that biography was already an established genre in the 17th century, although it often came disguised in the form of sermons and prefaces to the collected works of authors.  Readers will be startled to discover that biographies dealt not merely with the lives of saints, political figures, and others prominent in the upper classes but also with the middle class and with women, some of whom were quite learned and had an impact on their communities.  Moreover, biography as a genre not only preceded the novel but also influenced the structure of the first 18th-century novels, which were life narratives.  Pritchard includes chapters on the 17th century's greatest biographers: Izaak Walton, Thomas Fuller, Anthony Wood, John Aubrey, and Roger North.  An impeccable and accessible work of scholarship, this study makes a fundamental contribution to the literature on the development of biography as a genre.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-12-17 00:00:00 Aletta Steyn This book disappointed me. I bought it in England at Shakespeare's home in Stratford. Didn't have a lot of time to look through it before buying it, but picked it up thinking it looked great. I was really hoping to have some good material to use with my senior English classes. Well, it's interesting to some extent, but it is almost all primary source materials with not much commentary. A great deal of literature from the time period that is frankly pretty boring. I did not learn very much new about life in Shakespeare's time.