The Manifestation Of Subjectivity And Artistry In Biographical Writing

David Lodge is a famous British novelist and literary critic.In his writing career of more than 60 years,he has published 15 novels and several literary reviews with fruitful results.With the enhancement of his experience,Lodge began to show great interest in non-fiction in his later years,and wrote two biographical novels,Author,Author and A Man of Parts,which marked a significant turn in his writing career.Biographical novel are between biography and novel,and belong to novelized biography.Compared with traditional biography,biography have great innovation by incorporating novel skills.This innovation is mainly manifested in the subjectivity of the author and the artistry of the text.From the perspective of the author’s subjectivity,in the creation of traditional biography,biographers should avoid appearing their own "shadows" in the text in order to ensure the authenticity and objectivity of biographies.The fictitious feature of the novel itself manifests the author’s subject consciousness.The biographical novel integrates the subject consciousness shown in the novel into the creation of the biography,and skillfully combines the objective description of the characters’ life with the subjective intervention of the biographer,so as to better express the subject’s personality and reality.From the perspective of the artistic text,on the other hand,traditional biography lacks attention to the literariness of biography in order to pursue documentary reality,it will be easier makes biography,the accumulation of facts,and can use a variety of narrative in the novel creation,so that the novel text to achieve artistic rendering,bring better reading experience for readers.Biographical novels fully absorb the narrative skills of novels and apply the narrative strategies of novels to the creation of biographies,which makes biographies more literary and thus enhances the artistic nature of biographies.From the perspective of biography,biographical novel is a kind of biographical experiment and a new form of biography.Starting from Lodge’s two biographical novels,this paper explores the innovation that biographical novels bring to biographical creation.The paper mainly focuses on the following aspects:The introduction part is an overview of Lodge’s writing career,focusing on the creation of Lodge’s biographical novels in his later years.In addition,on the basis of domestic and foreign research review,the research ideas and viewpoints of this paper are put forward.The first chapter mainly analyzes the motivation of David Lodge’s biographical novel creation.From the perspective of the context of times,after the baptism of post-modernism,people have different understandings of authenticity and history,and the objective authenticity of history has been questioned.It is under this era background that more and more biographers begin to write biographical novels.At the same time,many novelists believe that the traditional novel creation form can no longer bear the events in real life,so there is an urgent need to innovate a new form,so the non-fiction writing came into being and entered the prosperous period.From the authors’ creative concept of change,on the one hand,the creation of biographical novel is a strategy adopted by Lodge to cope with the anxiety of his predecessors and even contemporary writers in biographical writing;on the other hand,it is also Lodge’s refutation of the conclusion that the postmodern author is dead.He tries to highlight the importance of the author in biographical writing through this way of creation.The second chapter mainly analyzes the author’s subjectivity in Lodge’s biographical novels.Compared with the traditional biography,the subjectivity of the author is mentioned to a high position by Lodge,which is embodied in three aspects:the first is the author’s conscious blurring of boundaries.Lodge in the biographical novel blurs the boundaries between biography and novel,by using a novel technique can better show the announcing the inner activities,on the other hand the Lodge by the scholar writer as juicy gossip,then nature will inevitably involve the comments of some writers and their works,blur the line between the biography and literature review;The second is the author’s return in the text.In Author,Author,David Lodge narrates James’ literary career and at the same time reflects Lodge’s own literary pursuits,showing the autobiographical nature of his biography.In the A Man of Parts,Lodge boldly shows his own existence as a virtual editor.Both biographical novels fully show the author’s return in the text and highlight the author’s subjectivity.The third expression is that the author guides the reader in the sub-text,which is divided into cover,title,preface,acknowledgment and essay.By supplementing the text with these sub-texts,Lodge fully provides available information that is helpful to understand the text,and then guides the reader in reading,thus achieving the purpose of highlighting the subjectivity.The third chapter mainly analyzes the artistic expression of the Lodge’s biographical novels.Traditional biography require objectivity and truth,so biographers will inevitably ignore the embodiment of literature in the creation,making the whole biography more like a pile of facts and materials.While biographical novel pays more attention to the embodiment of artistry and fully absorb the skills of novels to create biographies.On the one hand,the diversification of narrative perspectives will make the description of the subject more comprehensive,and also make the readers closer to the truth of the subject’s heart.On the other hand,various narrative techniques make the whole biography more novel and interesting,enhance the readability of the biography,bring readers different reading experience,and improve the readers’ aesthetic appreciation of the biography.The conclusion part is the summary of the whole text,discussing the significance and influence of Lodge’s biographical novels.Biographical novel is not only an experiment of novel creation,but also an experiment of biographical creation,which opens up a new form of biographical creation and has a certain significance for the creation of modern biography.