David Ellis (4) (1939–)
Author of Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding
For other authors named David Ellis, see the disambiguation page.
About the Author
David Ellis is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Kent in Canterbury (UK). He is the author of the third volume of the Cambridge biography of D. H. Lawrence (Dying Game), published in 1998, and of Death and the author: how D. H. Lawrence died, and was remembered (Oxford show more UP, 2008). His more recent publications include The Truth about William Shakespeare: Fact, fiction and modern biographies (Edinburgh UP, 2012), Memoirs of a Leavisite: The decline and jail of 'Cambridge English' (Liverpool UP, 2013), and Frank Cioffi: The philosopher in shirtsleeves (Bloomsbury, 2015). show less
Image credit: www.davidellis.com/
Works by David Ellis
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1939-06-23
- Gender
- male
Members
Reviews
The downfall of the genre of biography is that far too often the writer becomes enamored of the secondary (and sometimes even the tertiary) figures in the subject's life. Ellis' book starts of quite strong by staying quite steady on Byron and the Shelleys. However, part two devolves in to an endless litany of minor characters and how they came to be in Geneva that summer. The book gets mired in the minutiae of who called whom what. Worse, the Villa Diodati storytelling episode, arguably one show more of the most important things that happens that summer, gets merely one chapter. An admirable effort to study Byron in more situational rather than broad-stroke terms, but it doesn't quite work out. show less
Lists
Awards
Statistics
- Works
- 11
- Members
- 80
- Popularity
- #224,853
- Rating
- 2.8
- Reviews
- 1
- ISBNs
- 544
- Languages
- 13