'A life beyond life': The rise of English literary biography

My dissertation is a study of biography before biography. It examines the published life stories of English writers in the century and a half prior to and including the 1660's when the word "biography" was coined. Despite the steady rise of life writing during this formative period of vernacular publication, and the often conspicuous placement of authors' life stories as preface to their printed works, little attention has been paid to the urgent and often strategic ways that these documents addressed the topics of authorship, textual interpretation, and literary tradition---topics all fundamental to the way early modern readers came to imagine the nature of English literature. To trace the career of such writing from its first humanist renderings to its most elaborate seventeenth-century variations, I focus on a few of the most self-consciously experimental texts by and about authors of high ambition in their respective generations: the poet George Gascoigne on his own life, Fulke Greville on the life of Sir Philip Sidney, Abraham Cowley on himself, and, in a prefatory chapter, Erasmus on Saint Jerome. By examining the various ways these authors fashion biography out of available genres---dedicatory letter, apologia, essay, and the vita or "saint's life"---I show how their texts promote the ethical and political potentials of England's developing national literature. I also demonstrate how early modern life writing, through its rhetoric of privileged access to authorial intention, ultimately gestures towards a new mode of textual hermeneutics, one posited not upon the previously fundamental linkage of ethics to interpretation, but rather upon an emerging conception of the aesthetic.