Introduction: Biography and the Woman Writer Revisited

Abstract:The introduction offers a historical and conceptual frame for the four essays that make up the cluster on biography and women writers. We discuss the disputed status of biographical criticism in the 1980s and 1990s, when it became a crux of disagreement between poststructuralist and feminist theorists, as well as the lingering questions and dilemmas that biography raises in more recent scholarship on women's literature. Surveying the arguments of the four contributions to the cluster, the introduction stresses the particular turns that biographical criticism has taken at the present moment of inquiry into women's literary history, such as the unique challenges posed by the study of obscure and forgotten women and the fruitful effects of recent collaborative approaches. We also emphasize the particular utility of biography as a tool to access hidden areas of women's literary activity and a means of questioning the narratives that have solidified around canonical women authors.