Yang Zhengrun. A Modern Poetics of Biography. Nanjing, China: Nanjing University Press, May 2009.

Strikingly similar in scope and goals to A Theory of Auto/biography, only much larger, I take both these works as important nodes in the early development of an independent field of biography in China. What's so interesting about this sort of book is the effort to compare Western and Chinese biographical writing across the centuries. There's a completist attitude here, as if by thinking through "Western" writing as a whole in relation to "Chinese," there will no doubt be a way to develop "better" biographical writing in China.

Of course, this all in Chinese, so I'm reading it somewhat slowly. Here are my notes so far from the long introduction.

导论：资源与原则

"Biographical writing has now become one of the most important forms of literature in the whole field of culture 文化范畴." Yang hopes Chinese thinkers can develop a complete theory of biography 一套完整的传记理论. The whole point of this endeavor would be so that Chinese writers can write biographies that are as "good" as those in the west.

Biography is an ancient form in the west, central to the Torah, the dialogues Plato and other ancient texts. China also has a biographical tradition going back at least to the Springs and Autumns of Master Yan 宴子春秋. In Sima Qian there is also an answer for the great ancient biographer Plutarch and the father of autobiography, Augustine, but for Yang, this tradition is obviously ever-afterward stunted in comparison to the development of biography in the West.

During the 18th century, biography reached the point where it could recount not only heroes, but the lives of members of the middle classes, a significant achievement seen across the Western world in works by Samuel Johnson (Lives of the Poets), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Confessions), Goethe and Benjamin Franklin. As the 19th century merged into the 20th, other great works like Freud's biography of Leonardo da Vinci, as well the works of Lytton Strachey, André Mauroir, and Irving Stone appeared -- in these works, basic tensions in the human psyche were analyzed to a high degree.

In China, by contrast, nothing like a "modern biography" appeared until the final end of "feudalist society" with the collapse of the Qing dynasty. Pioneering thinkers like Zhu Dongrun and Hu Shi put out some admirable work, as did autobiographers Guo Moruo, Shen Congwen and Ba Jin. The Communist years interfered with this development, but still, by century's end, a diverse body of biographical literature.

Hu Shi and Zhu Dongrun had been correct to call biography the most backward of all literary fields in the 1920s, because at that time there was no canon of great biographies, and there were no full book-length biographies to speak of. This is because the art of biography is a doubly difficult one: one deal with so many historical materials and work to maintain accuracy, while at the same time using creative and psychologically-based methods to capture the personality 个性 of the biographical subject. Doing this better in future should be the goal of any comparative theory of biography.

It's not as if Western criticism, developed as it is, is very old. When James Clifford developed an anthology of biographical criticism from between 1560 and 1960, he found disappointingly little material. From the 18th century to the 20th, Samuel Johnson's notes in his journals The Rambler and The Idler were some of the few works people turned to over and over again.

Beginning in the 1920s, a generation of biographers turned proto-critics laid out the major issues of biographical theory. "Although they were not theorists themselves, they began to address theoretical issues of biography." Virginia Woolf, author of three excellent biographies herself, started off the discussion within her Bloomsbury School, which was enamored of the "new biographies" that tried harder to capture the personalities of their subjects using psychological methods, eschewing the old style of simply piling materials together to produce huge and boring tomes. André Maurois came next, writing over 14 influential biographies before becoming the first celebrity theorist. He lectured on biography issues at Cambridge and the University of Kansas. His book Aspects of Biography advances the theory of the double difficulty of drawing out the personality of the biographical subject while maintaining historical accuracy. Third on the list of practitioner-critics who laid the foundations of theoretical questions is Leon Edel, who particularly worked to develop issues of biographical psychology 传记心里学, such as the proper use of psychoanalysis 精神分析 in biography, the emotion in biographies 传记的移情, and the relationship between the biographer and his subject.

Post-Edel, biographical criticism has blossomed in a hundred directions, with several major theorists developing autobiography as a separate field. Biography also has begun to imbricate significantly with the study of fiction. All of these branches are worthy of the Chinese thinker's attention, for as Zhu Dongrun told us in a 1980 article,

Although biography from China has been developing for some time now, to seek progress in literature, we must not fail to seek help from outside of China. Learning is created by all of mankind together, so when the road becomes blocked, to seek some enlightenment, some help from the development of foreign literature is certainly no shame to us Chinese, so being embarrassed about it is of absolutely no use.