This document discusses and compares the historical and biographical approaches to literary criticism. The historical approach examines the context surrounding the author and time period a work was created, and assumes the relationship between art and society influences a work. The biographical approach focuses on illuminating a work's meaning and intent through examining facts about the author's life. An example is then given analyzing Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn through both the historical context of Twain's life in Hannibal, Missouri, and biographical details. The document concludes by briefly introducing moral-philosophical approaches which interpret works within the philosophical context of their time period.

1. The overall goal is to study the
Historical and Biographical
Approaches; define their similarity;
study its context, main principles and
the role in modern literature.

2. HISTORICAL AND
BIOGRAPHICAL
APPROACH

3. Historical and Biographical approaches have
been evolving over many years, its basic
tenants are perhaps most clearly articulated in
the writings of the 19th-century French critic
Hippolyte A. Taine, whose phrase race, milieu,
et moment, elaborated in his History of English
Literature, bespeaks a hereditary and
environmental determinism.

4. HISTORICAL CRITICISM
- The basic premise of Historical Criticism is
that literary meaning is grounded in the author.
The author is the context in which the work is
studied and is the cause of the work's meaning.
- Historical criticism is the search for the
author's original intention.
- To ask what a literary work means, according
to the historical critic, is to ask what the author
meant when he or she created it.

5. In order to study the author as context, it is
necessary for the historical critic to examine the
work against its historical surroundings and
determine how these surroundings worked with
the individuality of the author and the
individuality of the age to create and define the
text.

6. Historical Criticism assumes that the
relationship between art and society is organic;
views a literary work in relation to the standards
and social milieu of the period in which it was
produced.

7. BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM
- assumes that by examining the facts and
motives of an author's life, the meaning and
intent of his/her literary work can be
illuminated.
- this kind of criticism sees a literary work
chiefly, if not exclusively, as a reflection of its
author’s life and times or the life and times of
the characters in the work.

8. - For example, John Milton’s sonnet On the
Late Massacre in Piedmont illustrates the
topical quality that great literature may and
often does possess. This poem commemorates
the slaughter in 1655 of the Waldenses,
members of a Protestant sect living in the in the
valleys of Northern Italy.

9. On His Deceased Wife, a tribute to his second
wife Katherine Woodcock. Milton was blind
when he married her. A fact that explains the
line, “Her face was veiled”. In fact Milton affords
us an excellent example of an author whose
works reflects particular episodes in his life.

10. A SAMPLE OF THE HISTORICAL /
BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH IN
PRACTICE:
‘HUCKLEBERRY FINN’ AFTER
M. TWAIN

11. We know from M. Twain’s autobiographical writings and
from scholarly studies of him, principally those of Bernard
De Voto, A.B. Paine, and Dixon Wecter, that the most
sensational happenings and colourful characters in
Huckleberry Finn are based on actual events and persons
Twain saw in Hannibal, Missouri, where he grew up, and
in other towns up and down the Mississippi. For example,
the shooting of Old Boggs by Colonel Sherburn is drawn
from the killing of one ‘Uncle Sam’ Smarr by William
Owsley in the streets of Hannibal on January 24, 1845.
The attempted lynching of Sherburn is also an echo of
something that Mark Twain

12. saw as a boy, for he declared in later life that he once ‘saw
a brave gentleman deride and insult a [lunch] mob and
drive it away’. During the summer of 1847 Benson
Blankenship, older brother of the prototype Huck, secretly
aided a runaway slave by taking food to him as his hideout
on an island across the river from Hannibal. Benson did
this for several weeks and resolutely refused to be enticed
into betraying the man for the reward offered for his
capture. This is undoubtedly the historical source of Huck’s
loyalty to Jim that finally resulted in his electing to ‘go to
Hell’ in defiance of law, society, and religion rather than
turn in his friend.

14. MORAL AND
PHILOSOPHICAL
APPROACHES

15. MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL
APPROACHES
-The moral-philosophical approach is as old as
classical Greek and Roman critics. Its main
practitioners are Plato, Horace, Matthew Arnold,
etc. Plato.
- Horace stressed that literature should be
delightful and instructive.
- The basic position of such critics is that the
larger function of literature is to teach morality
and to probe philosophical issues.

16. - They would interpret literature within a
context of the philosophical thought of a period
or group.
- From their point of view Jean-Paul Sartre and
Albert Camus can be read profitable only if one
understands existentialism.
- Pope’s Essay on Man may be grasped only if
one understands the meaning and the role of
reason in the eighteenth-century thought.