Pathography
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- A biography that focuses on faults, unlucky circumstances, failures, and other negative aspects of the person's life.
- A biography by a physician exploring the effects a disease may have had on a person's life.
An article on Shakespeare's sonnets in the Westminster Review of 1857 noted:
- "Here it was that Augustus Schlegel erred when he thought that the sonnets would afford material for a fresh biography of Shakspeare. They do not ... They are not so much biography, as, if we may be allowed to coin a word, pathography.".
In a review of a biography of Jean Stafford Joyce Carol Oates revived the word calling some warts-and-all biographers
- pathographers saying that they focused " pathography typically focuses upon a far smaller canvas, sets its standards much lower. Its motifs are dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct."
See also
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