Historical and biographical criticism interprets a literary text by placing it directly against the specific circumstances of the author's actual life and the historical period the work was written in, drawing on letters, diaries, biographical records and contemporary historical events to inform a reading of the text itself. This approach treats a work's meaning as genuinely shaped by facts sitting outside the page, an author's personal losses, political events of the day, rather than treating the text as something that could be fully explained purely from its own internal words alone.
Biographical detail can reveal intentions and references a purely internal reading would miss
Knowing that an author wrote a particular passage shortly after a specific personal loss, or that a novel's fictional setting closely mirrors a real historical event the author lived through, can genuinely illuminate a text's themes, imagery and emphasis in ways a reading confined strictly to the words on the page might miss entirely. Historical and biographical criticism treats this outside information not as a distraction from the "real" text but as genuinely relevant evidence for understanding what the author was actually working through and referencing when they wrote it.
This approach commits critics to real, verifiable historical and biographical research
Because historical and biographical criticism grounds its interpretations in facts about an author's actual life and historical moment, it commits critics to doing genuine archival and historical research, verifying dates, correspondence and historical context, rather than relying purely on close reading of the text in isolation. This is exactly what distinguishes the approach from other critical schools that deliberately set an author's biography and historical circumstance aside: historical and biographical criticism treats that outside context as essential evidence, not incidental colour, for arriving at a genuinely well-supported interpretation.
What we're still unsure about
That biographical and historical context can genuinely illuminate a text's themes and references is well established, extensively practised literary scholarship. What's more genuinely a matter of ongoing critical debate is exactly how much authority an author's own biography or stated intentions should actually carry when interpreting a text, since critics in other traditions have argued that a work's meaning can and does depart from what its author consciously intended, and literary scholars continue to actively disagree about how much weight biographical and historical evidence should be given relative to the text's own internal features when the two seem to point toward different readings.
This sits inside Historical & Biographical Criticism, one of seven topics in Literary Analysis, one of five domains in Literature, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.