Research Catalog

Title

Sidetracks : explorations of a romantic biographer / Richard Holmes.

Author

Holmes, Richard, 1945-

Publication

• New York : Pantheon Books, [2000]
• ©2000

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 420 pages; 25 cm

Summary

""This is the fragmented tale of a single biographical quest," says Holmes, "a thirty-year journey in search of the perfect Romantic subject and the form to fit it."" "Sidetracks pursues this quest through an extraordinary and eclectic assortment of Romantic and Gothic writers and personalities - French, English, Dutch, and American, some major, some minor, but all made hypnotically alive and memorable through Holmes's transforming touch. We meet Chatterton and de Nerval, Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin, James Boswell and Robert Louis Stevenson, Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda." "With each of these twenty pieces Holmes shows how fluid, playful, and unconstrained the many voices of biography can be. The collection is held together by a subtle autobiographical thread: "To be sidetracked is, after all, to be led astray by a path or an idea, a scent or a tune, and maybe lost forever.""--Jacket.

Subject

• Holmes, Richard, 1945-
• Authors, English > Biography > History and criticism
• Authors > Biography > History and criticism
• Biographers > Great Britain > Biography
• Biography as a literary form
• Romanticism > Great Britain
• biographies (literary works)
• Authors > Biography
• Authors, English > Biography
• Biographers
• Romanticism
• Great Britain

Genre/Form

• collective biographies.
• Biographies.
• Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Note

• Includes index.

Contents

A Romantic Premonition -- Thomas Chatterton (1970) -- Lost in France -- Monsieur Nadar (1974) -- Gautier in London (1975) -- Poor Pierrot (1976) -- Inside the Tower (1977) -- Five Gothic Shadows -- The Singular Affair of the Reverend Mr Barham (1978) -- The Reverend Maturin and Mr Melmoth (1981) -- M.R. James and Others (1974) -- John Stuart Mill (1979) -- Lord Lisle and the Tudor Nixon Tapes (1982) -- A Philosophical Love Story -- The Feminist and the Philosopher: A Love Story (1987) -- Shelley's Ghost -- Scrope's Last Throw (1977) -- To the Tempest Given (1992) -- Escapes to Paris -- Scott and Zelda: One Last Trip (1980) -- A Summer with the Novelist (1994) -- Letters from Paris (1994) -- Voltaire's Grin (1995) -- Homage to the Godfather -- Boswell's Bicentenary (1991) -- Boswell Among the Tulips (1992) -- Dr Johnson's First Cat (1999).

ISBN

• 0679438467
• 9780679438465

LCCN

00033984

OCLC

• ocm44128132
• 44128132
• SCSB-14068831

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library