Body Parts by Hermione Lee
As readers, we seem to be increasingly fascinated by studies of individual lives. In this timely, unusual and exhilarating collection Hermione Lee is concerned in different ways with approaches to 'life-writing': the relation of biography to fiction and history; the exploration of writers' lives in connection with their works; the new and changing ways in which biographies, memoirs, diaries and autobiographies can be discussed. As the title suggests, she also unravels the complex links between physical, sensual details and the 'body' of a work. 'Shelley's Heart and Pepys' Lobsters', for example, deals with myths, contested objects and things that go missing, while 'Jane Austen Faints' takes five varied accounts of the same dramatic moment to ask how biography deals with the private lives of famous women, a theme taken up in 'Virginia Woolf's Nose', on the way that the author's life-stories have been transformed into fiction and film. Other essays tease out different approaches, like that on Philip and Edmund Gosse, which enquires into the opposition between literary and scientific lives, or the fascinating 'Reading in Bed', which explores women's formative childhood reading, and how it enters into their adult writing. The subjects range from T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee, from May Sinclair and Rosamond Lehmann to Eudora Welty and Brian Moore. Rich, diverting and entertaining, these brilliant studies by a leading critic and internationally acclaimed biographer raise profound and intriguing issues about every aspect of writing, and reading, a life.
Hermione Lee is a Fellow of New College Oxford, and the first woman Goldsmith Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. Before moving to Oxford she taught at Liverpool university, and was then a Professor at York. She writes regularly for the Guardian Review, and is also a well known broadcaster and television critic. She was made a CBE in 2003. Her own critical and biographical studies include Elizabeth Bowen- An Estimation, Willa Cather and the internationally acclaimed Virginia Woolf- A Life. She is currently working on a life of Edith Wharton.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780701177591 |
| ISBN 10 | 0701177594 |
| Title | Body Parts |
| Author | Hermione Lee |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Vintage Publishing |
| Year published | 2005-01-06 |
| Number of pages | 256 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |