ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud's account of biography, like To Paulin's is, in a sense, Romantic, although his preference would seem to be for an unidealized, plain version of the form. If modern literary criticism arises out of the Romantic account of the self, regardless of whether a particular critical school endorses or dismisses Romantic subjectivity, then it is easy to see Romanticism engendering, along similar lines, a tradition of heroic biography. Romantic biography, like autobiography, is committed to self-determination and the exposition of an autonomous individuality - an autonomy which is either glorious or self-contradictory or both. What matters for questions of biography is less the manner of Richard Holmes's advocacy than the kind of his sympathy, although the former also helps reveal the latter. Biography conjures a presence and constructs a space where judgement is suspended. The emphasis on humanity in Paulin and Freud calls for a mode of reading biography which is purified of fantasizing projection and of prurient interest.
