Rana Tekcan

The dynamic between the biographer and the subject is, perhaps, one of the most fascinating aspects of biography as a genre. How does the biographer stage the illusion that is the narrative life, the illusion that the subject assumes a living form through words? In contrast to purely fictional forms, biography writing does not allow total freedom to the biographer in this creative act. Ideally, a biography's backbone is structured by accurate historical facts. But its spirit lies elsewhere. The way a biographer captures the spirit of a subject is intriguingly shaped by the historical distance between the two. We find three types of distance in biographical narrative: First, where the biographer and the subject personally know one another; second, where the biographer is a near contemporary of the subject; and third, where biographer and subject are distinctly separated; in some cases, by hundreds of years. In this revised and expanded edition, Rana Tekcan explores how some of the most accomplished biographers manage to recreate “life” across time and space. She looks at their illusionary art through the narrative strategies in Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage, James Boswell's Life of Johnson, Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, Michael Holroyd's Lytton Strachey, Park Honan's Jane Austen, and Andrew Motion's Keats.

Rana Tekcan is Assistant Professor of English at the Department of Comparative Literature, Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey. She has published articles on Boswell, Austen, Shakespeare and biography as a genre, edited Turkish translations of Pride and Prejudice, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, and translated Vladimir Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense, Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, Jane Austen’s Juvenilia and A.S. Byatt’s Possession into Turkish

“Tekcan's initial question—asking what it is that brings life writing to life—is an interesting one, and her case studies yield some glancing insights, particularly in the discussion of more recent biographies.”
- Biography 34.4

“This readable account contains a useful introduction to Boswell and Johnson, friendship, writing, and loyalty [.]”
- Year’s Work in English Studies 2012