버지니아 울프와 「이름 없는 사람들의 전기」 (Virginia Woolf and “the Lives of the Obscure”)

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초록

“The Lives of the Obscure” is a short biographical sketch written by Virginia Woolf, in which she tries to conglomerate lives of people not prominent but obscure and hidden. She associates those obscure lives with a new departure in biographical writing. This paper will explore how Woolf developed her idea of the new biography in terms of the lives of the obscure, while the long-held axiom was that the biography is for the great or the prominent.
Being a daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, the chief editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, a monumental compilation of biographies of the Victorian era, Woolf was highly interested in biography. In a sense, her writing as a whole may be considered as “developing narratives of biography.” Criticizing Victorian biographies for their hero-worshipping attitude and mannerism, Woolf anticipated a new form of biography in her contemporary writers, such as Lytton Strachey and Harold Nicolson. According to her, a biography should successfully combine fact and fiction, in her own words, “granite and rainbow” for the “truthful transmission of personality.” Her emphasis on personality over action in biography should be understood in terms of her modernist literary practice. In “Modern Fiction” and “Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown,” Woolf claims that the real life is essentially internal, thus cannot be conveyed through the mere description of external facts, the idea of which is also applicable to biography. Her dilemma was how to transmit personality of the subject without overly depending on fiction. Due to her firm belief that fact and fiction shouldn’t mix, she had difficulties in writing Roger Fry, an official biography of her friend Roger Fry. This paper claims that the lives of the obscure could provide her with a way to compromise her views of biography and modern fiction beyond the binary composition of fact and fiction. It may open up a new vista of writing which is biographical, fictional and historical at the same time, because by writing a collective biography of the obscure one may adopt one’s imagination more freely than in a conventional biography of the great or the prominent.

영어초록

“The Lives of the Obscure” is a short biographical sketch written by Virginia Woolf, in which she tries to conglomerate lives of people not prominent but obscure and hidden. She associates those obscure lives with a new departure in biographical writing. This paper will explore how Woolf developed her idea of the new biography in terms of the lives of the obscure, while the long-held axiom was that the biography is for the great or the prominent.
Being a daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, the chief editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, a monumental compilation of biographies of the Victorian era, Woolf was highly interested in biography. In a sense, her writing as a whole may be considered as “developing narratives of biography.” Criticizing Victorian biographies for their hero-worshipping attitude and mannerism, Woolf anticipated a new form of biography in her contemporary writers, such as Lytton Strachey and Harold Nicolson. According to her, a biography should successfully combine fact and fiction, in her own words, “granite and rainbow” for the “truthful transmission of personality.” Her emphasis on personality over action in biography should be understood in terms of her modernist literary practice. In “Modern Fiction” and “Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown,” Woolf claims that the real life is essentially internal, thus cannot be conveyed through the mere description of external facts, the idea of which is also applicable to biography. Her dilemma was how to transmit personality of the subject without overly depending on fiction. Due to her firm belief that fact and fiction shouldn’t mix, she had difficulties in writing Roger Fry, an official biography of her friend Roger Fry. This paper claims that the lives of the obscure could provide her with a way to compromise her views of biography and modern fiction beyond the binary composition of fact and fiction. It may open up a new vista of writing which is biographical, fictional and historical at the same time, because by writing a collective biography of the obscure one may adopt one’s imagination more freely than in a conventional biography of the great or the prominent.

참고자료

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