This Long Pursuit : Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

• Autore: Holmes Richard
• Pubblicazione: Westminster : , : Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, , 2017; ©2017
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (279 pages)
• Disciplina: 809.93592
• Nota di contenuto: Part I. Confessions -- Travelling -- Experimenting -- Teaching -- Forgetting -- Ballooning -- Part II. Restorations -- Margaret Cavendish -- Zélide -- Madame de Staël -- Mary Wollstonecraft -- Mary Somerville -- Part III. Afterlives -- John Keats the well-beloved -- Shelley undrowned -- Thomas Lawrence revarnished -- Coleridge misremembered -- William Blake rediscovered.
• Sommario/riassunto: From the award-winning author of The Age of Wonder and Falling Upwards, here is a luminous meditation on the art of biography that fuses the author's own experiences with a history of the genre and explores the fascinating and surprising relationship between fact and fiction. In a book that ranges widely over art, science, and poetry, Richard Holmes confesses to a lifetime's obsession with his Romantic subjects. It has become for him a pursuit, or pilgrimage of the heart, that has taken him across three centuries, through much of Europe, and into the lively company of many earlier biographers. Central to this quest is a powerful and tender evocation of the lives of women both scientific and literary, some well-known and some almost lost to history: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Dutch intellectual Zélide. Holmes also investigates the myths that have overshadowed the lives of some favorite Romantic figures: the love-stunned John Keats, the waterlogged Percy Bysshe Shelley, the chocolate-box painter Thomas Lawrence, the opium-soaked genius Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the mad visionary bard William Blake. The diversity of Holmes's material is a testimony to his empathy, erudition, and inquiring spirit--and, sometimes, to his mischievous streak. The Long Pursuit gives us a unique insider's account of a biographer at work: traveling, teaching, researching, fantasizing, forgetting, and even ballooning. From this great chronicler of the Romantics now comes a chronicle of himself and his intellectual passions; it contains his most personal and most seductive writing.
• Titolo autorizzato: This Long Pursuit
• ISBN: 1-101-87176-8
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910164949803321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II