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BIOGRAPHY AS A CULTURAL DISCIPLINE 301

persists today. Phyllis Rose points out, however, that it can often embody
an ideological bias which functions as "a tool by which the dominant
society reinforces its values" and, hence, as a genre "it is much more
elitist then the novel."^ Spurred by egalitarian and pluralistic motivations,
this traditional catchment for biographies has, in recent years, been
extended to included "marginalized" individuals such as women and those
of ethnic backgrounds who have led interesting or unusual lives or who
are viewed as representative of a particular group's experiences. There
have even been attempts to extend the genre by the writing of group
biographies and, to use biographical techniques to describe the profile of
a type. (For example, one can view Sartre's description of anti-Semitism
as an attempt to provide a composite profile of the anti-semitic
personality.*)
The wide spectrum of biography is a consequence of its long and
variegated history. Its origins he in the hieroglyphics of Egypt and the
fragments of early Greek literature but it only in Rome during the first
century A D. that it began to exhibit its distinctive form, and develop as
a professional endeavour. Initially, biography was viewed either as a
didactic endeavour that provided exemplars or models of moral virtue
(Plutarch) or as an attempt to capture the complex and comprehensive
portrait of a subject's life (Suetonius). During its Medieval incarnation the
biographical task assumed the form of ecclesiastical exhortation, i.e.,
hagiography, and to a lesser extent, poUtical encomium. The concern for
individuals and the renewed interest in history, biography and autobi-
ography that begun during the Renaissance flourished during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as represented by the writings of Sir
Thomas More, William Roper and George Cavendish. It led Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, in 1810, to coin the phrase "the age of personahty"' to
signal the historical and cultural context of individualism (a nineteenth
century term) in which modern biography, in contradistinction to

^ Phyllis Rose, "Fact and Fiction in Biography," in Writing of Women: Essays
in a Renaissance (Middleton, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 68.
* cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, translated by George J. Becker
(New York: Grove Press), 1960.
' Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "A Prefatory Observation on Modern Biography,"
The Friend, January 25, 1810, 338-39.