Pathography  

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  1. A biography that focuses on faults, unlucky circumstances, failures, and other negative aspects of the person's life.
  2. 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




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Pathography" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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