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Biographical/Historical
Criticism  
 

Biographical/Historical criticism focuses on the biographical and historical elements outside of a text. These elements give the reader a sense of what the author was like as a person and what type of life they led during a certain time period.  
 
 ►What does historical/biographical criticism focus on?
 ►Application Example
 ►For Further Exploration...


Historical elements will help you to interpret a text by reconstructing the past, or the context of a work.

Historical Criticism considers
  • military,
  • social, and
  • literary histories.

Studying these histories will allow you to understand the author’s time and then relate it to your response to text. You can make direct connections between authors and their texts by thinking about the author’s history and the historical events that may have affected their work. 

To analyze a text with biographical and historical criticism, follow these steps.
  • Determine the historical setting of the work.
  • Investigate the author’s biography.
  • Consider how the historical or biographical background complements or contrasts with the text. 
  • Consider other texts that might be related to the text that you are studying.
  • Identify how ideology shapes similar texts.

  • Application Example
    If you were to apply biographical and historical criticism to Hamlet you could research the late 1500's and early 1600's, which is the time period that Shakespeare lived and wrote in.  You could consider the politics, religion, social customs, and literature of that time and relate those historical elements to characters, scenes, or settings in Hamlet.

For Further Exploration...

Kelly Stevens, 20 April 2004