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302 MANO DANIEL

hagiography, was beginning to assert itself.^^ The Victorian version was
supplanted eventually in the early part of this century by the appearance,
in large part influenced by the biographies of Lytton Strachey and
Froude, of what has come to be known as "New" or "Modern"
biography.
Modern literary biography's emergence in the 1920's can be attributed
to the interest generated by Harold Nicolson, the vision and work of
Virginia Woolf and advances in scientific, philosophical, psychological and,
especially, psychoanalytic techniques. Its distinctiveness was marked by a
shift in focus from an exaltation of the individual to an intimate act of
critical evaluation performed through examining, describing and explaining
the "inner," or "interiority" of the individual and its relation to her mani-
fested actions and deeds. This new form of humanistic expression was
heavily influenced by historiographical advances in the nineteenth century
and by the assumptions and devices utilized with the advent and
prominence of novels. As Edel points out, the "modern biography is as
modern as the novel. "^^
Since a comprehensive treatment of biography is beyond the scope of
this essay, I will, following Edel, focus on the practice of "modern"
biography. As a product of advances procured by the age of Enlighten-
ment and in the social disciplines inspired by its wake, it provides a good
glimpse of the discursive practice's ability to "present a unified life, . . .
reveal this unity with specific anecdotal evidence, and . . . demonstrate
change, development, and/or growth with the passage of time."^^ It is
thus an exemplary embodiment of many of the theoretical and cultural
assumptions that undergird the study of the practical/cultural world.
As an act of reconstitution or resuscitation, a biography needs to be
historically accurate, factually credible and internally coherent. The
biography may aim at a sense of coherence either by a factual pattern
arranged in terms of a chronological axis or by an interpretive pattern
based upon a sense of the inner life of the subject. It should reflect the
unrelenting veracity of the biographer to mold the "granite-like solidity"
of truth and "the rainbow-like intangibility" of personality "into one

^^ Virginia Wooif, "The Art of Biography," in Biography Past and Present:
Selections and Critical Essays, edited by William H. Davenport and Ben Siegal (New
York: Charles Scribner's, 1965), 165.
^^ Edel, Literary Biography, 5.
^^ Peter Nagourney, "Literary Biography," Biography 1.2 (1978), 88.