Whether a writer's life belongs in the reading of their work is the oldest live argument in criticism.
The position, which dominated for half a century, held that the text is the only evidence.
could not be recovered, and a reader who appealed to it was explaining rather than reading.
The position produced a great deal of close attention to language and a certain blindness.
A poem written in a prison and a poem written in a study are not the same , whatever the words.
reading, in its weaker form, simply restores that context.
In its stronger form it reduces a work to the events of a life, which is the failure the s were resisting.
Most working critics now move between the two positions without announcing it.
The argument has changed shape rather than ended, and the new form concerns rather than biography.
A reader who learns that a novelist behaved badly asks whether the novel survives the knowledge.
Three answers circulate and none is satisfactory on its own.
The first separates the work entirely, which is and asks the reader to perform an act of forgetting that nobody can perform.
The second refuses the work, which is also and empties the shelf faster than most people expect.
The third reads the work with the knowledge included, which is what actually happens and what criticism is for.
Money complicates the third position in a way that the first two avoid.
Reading a dead author costs a living person nothing; buying a living one funds them.
That distinction does more work in practice than any position, and it appears in almost no critical essay.
Criticism has always been better at describing judgement than at describing what a reader actually does with a wallet.