The problem of making a genre typology of English biographical prose

Abstract

The article outlines various approaches
to classifying English biographical texts.
Both European and Russian scholars tend to base
their investigations on criteria relating only to the
content plane without paying due attention to the linguistic
(stylistic) side of the matter. Genre analyses
have lead to different results and typologies, as the
terminological status of the concept of genre is too
obscure to provide a basis for the stylistic analysis of
biographies