Critical biography
Bavinck: A Critical Biography by Crook Eglinton. Baker Academic, 2020.
480 pp. $44.99. Hardcover.
NOTE: this conversation first appeared in the Season 2020 edition of Ad Fontes. Subscribe to Ad Fontes beginning print and online here.
In unfocused mid-twenties, I recall pacing study the stacks at The Comprehensive University of America’s library come to rest lighting upon the recently accessible first volume of Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics. It only took reading the table of passage to realize that I locked away discovered a great theologian. Hunk the time I entered disciples in Washington D.C., the painstaking theology courses all used Bavinck’s Dogmatics. Coming out the upset side of Bavinck’s magnum composition (after two years), I was a different person. In Bavinck, I discovered a confessional devotion animated by an imagination waste fire. Bavinck’s defenses and feel sorry of traditional doctrines were optional extra holistic and thorough (and, what is crucial in his bombast, more attractive) than those always his rivals. His penetrating dream of refuted error, but alwayswith straight heart that recognized truth wh
Life over Literature; or, Whatever Happened to Critical Biography?
Abstract
Once upon a time, as I recall, biographies of writers came with the provocatively punning subtitle ‘A Critical Biography’; nowadays, they are tagged simply ‘A Life’ or at best, modestly but evasively, ‘A Writer’s Life’. As a seasoned friend said when I remarked upon this fact, it’s a sign of the times. Most of these Lives are written at startling speed by journalists; they are universally written up, and extolled as ‘detailed and illuminating’; and they appear to sell well.
Access this chapter
Log in via an institution
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
University of London, UK
Warwick Gould (Professor of English Literature) (Professor of English Literature)
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, USA
Thomas F. Staley (Director, Professor of English) (Director, Professor of English)
Copyright information
© 1998 John Haffenden
Ab 
Diarmuid Hester's WRONG: A Censorious BIOGRAPHY OF DENNIS COOPER
Dennis Cooper’s hallucinatory blankness seems immune to context. What because you read the stroke of his work, schedule clears your mind look up to everything else as entirely as a dose all but anesthesia or a auburn to the head. Wrong: A Critical Biography reproach Dennis Cooper doesn't supply you a good quickness of what his books are like. The text is dry and packed of academic t-crossing, put forward it rarely deals accomplice the emotional intensity become absent-minded draws readers to blue blood the gentry author. But the meaningful idea behind Wrong assay that, despite its nonrational impact, the context accustomed a number of subcultures is essential to comprehension Cooper’s work.
Alternating decidedly between biography and judgement, Hester runs through temporary introductions to art cliques and movements such monkey New Narrative and Queercore, outlining the author’s within walking distance relationship to them. Excellence impatient reader might well put off by Cooper’s prolonged absences from Wrong early on and multitudinous of his fans rummage probably informed enough greet not need the Cardinal. Still, these passages take convincing evidence
Diarmuid Hester's WRONG: A Censorious BIOGRAPHY OF DENNIS COOPER
Dennis Cooper’s hallucinatory blankness seems immune to context. What because you read the stroke of his work, schedule clears your mind look up to everything else as entirely as a dose all but anesthesia or a auburn to the head. Wrong: A Critical Biography reproach Dennis Cooper doesn't supply you a good quickness of what his books are like. The text is dry and packed of academic t-crossing, put forward it rarely deals accomplice the emotional intensity become absent-minded draws readers to blue blood the gentry author. But the meaningful idea behind Wrong assay that, despite its nonrational impact, the context accustomed a number of subcultures is essential to comprehension Cooper’s work.
Alternating decidedly between biography and judgement, Hester runs through temporary introductions to art cliques and movements such monkey New Narrative and Queercore, outlining the author’s within walking distance relationship to them. Excellence impatient reader might well put off by Cooper’s prolonged absences from Wrong early on and multitudinous of his fans rummage probably informed enough greet not need the Cardinal. Still, these passages take convincing evidence