Talk:Biography

Is Biography really the name of an academic, scholarly discipline? Academics do, of course, write biographies, but is the writing of biographies properly considered a discipline itself? For example, philosophers write biographies of philosophers; historians write biographies of political figures; ordinary writers and scholars of pop culture write biographies of pop figures; art historians write biographies of artists; etc.

If biography really is properly considered a discipline unto itself, then, it follows, you could explain on biography exactly why it deserves to be so considered. Does it have its own journals (like?)? Its own scholarly standards (such as?)? Its experts (who?)? --LMS

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I don't know if it is a "discipline" or a "subdiscipline" of history or a "literary genre", but the work being invested into writing biographies is different from other work that the same people do. What does it take to be qualified as a "discipline"? Is there a wikipedia entry that explains what a discipline is?

Links to biography should be found from History and Literature.

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Some of the entries linked to from the Biography page are plurals, other are singulars. It is natural to write that Einstein was a physicist (singular) and make it a link to the page of physicists (plural). Should we make it a convention of Wikipedia always to use the plural for such entries? In that case, maybe the bio page should be "biographies" (plural) as opposed to the "discipline" (or art) of Biography.

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An interesting book might be:

Park Honan[?], Authors' Lives: On Literary Biography and the Arts of Language, ISBN:0-312-04261-2