The new biography
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The New Biography ()
Woolf, Virginia. "The New Biography ()". Biography in Theory: Key Texts with Commentaries, edited by Wilhelm Hemecker and Edward Saunders, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, , pp.
Woolf, V. (). The New Biography (). In W. Hemecker & E. Saunders (Ed.), Biography in Theory: Key Texts with Commentaries (pp. ). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.
Woolf, V. The New Biography (). In: Hemecker, W. and Saunders, E. ed. Biography in Theory: Key Texts with Commentaries. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, pp.
Woolf, Virginia. "The New Biography ()" In Biography in Theory: Key Texts with Commentaries edited by Wilhelm Hemecker and Edward Saunders, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter,
Woolf V. The New Biography (). In: Hemecker W, Saunders E (ed.) Biography in Theory: Key Texts with Commentaries. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter; p
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New Biography
Spinoza: Life and Legacy
by Jonathan Israel
Spinoza: Life and Legacy is a new biography of the 17th-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, by historian Jonathan Israel. Israel is a leading historian of early modern Europe, and an expert on the Dutch Republic, the tolerant—by 17th-century standards—world in which Spinoza grew up. His parents had fled Portugal because of the Inquisition and, as Israel points out, that "dark Iberian context was a crucial factor in Spinoza's background, early life, and formation and likewise an essential dimension for understanding his thought generally." The book builds on Steven Nadler's biography of Spinoza, and at more than 1, pages is absolutely not for beginners. Rather, it's for those seeking to think deeply—and disagree with Israel at times, no doubt—about Spinoza and his life and thought.
(If you're looking for a more introductory approach to Spinoza, our interview about him is with Steven Nadler)
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1In recent years, critics have highlighted that the presence of the auto/biographical in modernist texts has largely been underestimated and have contributed to revealing the intricate auto/biographical constructions woven in the literature of the modernist period.1
2The New Biography fryst vatten a specific form of biography which emerged in the s and s beneath the impulse of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and Harold Nicolson. Although their appreciation of each other varied, these writers read and influenced each other’s work; they formulated similar conceptualisations of biography, giving strength to Woolf’s idea of a ‘new school of biographies’ (Woolf , ). This leads me to consider them as forming a consistent grouping of biographers and I shall use the term New Biography to refer to their praxis. The importance of Harold Nicolson in this particular threesome has generally been underestimated and Nicolson’s valuable contribution to modernist biography has often been overl