Biofictional Histories, Mutations and Forms

ISBN-13: 9780367029890 / Angielski / Miękka / 2019 / 110 str.

Michael Lackey

Opis

Biofiction, literature that names its protagonist after a historical figure, has become a dominant literary form in the last forty years. Although writers such as J.M. Coetzee, Joyce Carol Oates, Hilary Mantel, Colm Tóibín, and Russell Banks have authored award-winning biographical novels, there remains confusion about the nature of biofiction. This collection defines the nature of the aesthetic form, clarifies why it has come into being, specifies what it is uniquely capable of signifying, shows how it pictures the historical and critiques the political, and suggests potential directions for future studies. This book was first published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Spis treści

Introduction: Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction  1. Going for the Subjective: One way to Write Biographical Fiction  2. Writing Biographical Fiction: Some Personal Reflections  3. On Hoaxes, Humbugs, and Fictional Portraiture  4. The Rise of the Biographical Novel and the Fall of the Historical Novel  5. The President’s Glands: Somatic Interiority and the Referents of Biographical Fiction in American Adulterer  6. The Notable Woman in Fiction: The Afterlives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

O autorze

Michael Lackey is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota – Morris, USA. He is a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first century intellectual, political, and literary history. He has authored and edited seven books, including The American Biographical Novel (2016); Biographical Fiction: A Reader (2016); and Truthful Fictions (2014), which contains his interviews with biographical novelists such as Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Michael Cunningham, and Julia Alvarez.