John Maynard – författare

In Nineteenth-Century Lives, first published in 1989, ten distinguished critics and biographers consider what it means to narrate a life. Their illustrative texts are largely taken from nineteenth-century biography, autobiography and the novel, but narrative is the broader genre that unites their various inquiries. The principal issues, theoretical and practical, are framed by Margaret Atwood, J. Hillis Miller and Phyllis Rose. 'The biographer, like the novelist, is a constructor of narratives; it's just that the ground rules are a little different,' writes Atwood. Among the matters they debate are the boundaries of fact and fiction, the professed power of the narrator, and the figurative underpinings of autobiography. But many of these essays are delightful and provocative biographical and autobiographical excursions in themselves. Atwood describes her early fear of biography, Morton Cohen narrates an exciting bit of detective work into the life of Lewis Carroll, and John Rosenberg gives a vivid and frequently revisionary reading of many aspects of Darwin's life.

John Maynard's original and provocative study looks at sexuality and religion as creations of language, in the literary and cultural discourses of Victorian England. After a wide-ranging introduction (drawing on myth, anthropology, comparative religion and the history of sexuality) Maynard goes on to articulate and interpret the strikingly complex and varied ways in which the earnest sceptic Arthur Hugh Clough, the Protestant Charles Kingsley, and the Catholic convert Coventry Patmore placed the relation of sexuality and religion at the centre of their work. A final chapter on Jude the Obscure demonstrates Thomas Hardy's deconstruction of the endeavour to make sense of sexuality and religion, fragmenting this inherited discourse into mere words and bodily parts, in a disintegration of the great constructive vision of his predecessors.

In Nineteenth-Century Lives, first published in 1989, ten distinguished critics and biographers consider what it means to narrate a life. Their illustrative texts are largely taken from nineteenth-century biography, autobiography and the novel, but narrative is the broader genre that unites their various inquiries. The principal issues, theoretical and practical, are framed by Margaret Atwood, J. Hillis Miller and Phyllis Rose. 'The biographer, like the novelist, is a constructor of narratives; it's just that the ground rules are a little different,' writes Atwood. Among the matters they debate are the boundaries of fact and fiction, the professed power of the narrator, and the figurative underpinings of autobiography. But many of these essays are delightful and provocative biographical and autobiographical excursions in themselves. Atwood describes her early fear of biography, Morton Cohen narrates an exciting bit of detective work into the life of Lewis Carroll, and John Rosenberg gives a vivid and frequently revisionary reading of many aspects of Darwin's life.