Lecture 2.5.4 - The Biographical Perspective

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Lecture Overview

In the Biographical Perspective the writer uses details from their own upbringing, family issues, life experiences fictionalized in their work. 

Some novelists like the American Thomas Wolfe used actual events and conversations in his work, even family members – only their names were changed. Look Homeward Angel is an example.

The previous lesson contained a very clear example of a writer whose work was clearly written from a biographical perspective. Dylan Thomas writing about his childhood growing up on a farm in Wales in the poem Fern Hill and speaking to his father who was dying. In the Villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”

In the Grade 12 English course I have included a short story he wrote called Quite Early One Morning about a walk he takes through the seaside village where he lived describing the houses and all the people who lived in them.
Writers who draw on their own life experience is my personal favourite perspective. They include writers like Charles Dickens and the Irish poet W. B. Yeats

Teacher reads The Lake Isle of Innisfree to illustrate

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