Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction

ISBN-13: 9783031090189 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022

Spis treści

1. Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction: Introduction.

Part I. Recovery, Revision, Ventriloquism: Imagining Historical Women.

2. “Everything Is Out of Place”: Virginia Woolf, Women, and (Meta-)Historical Biofiction.

3. Fictional Futures for a Buried Past: Representations of Lucia Joyce.

4. Imagining Jiang Qing: The Biographer’s Truth in Anchee Min’s Becoming Madame Mao.

Part II. Re-imagining the Early Modern Subject.

5. From Betrayed Wife to Betraying Wife: Re-writing Katherine of Aragon as Catalina in Philippa Gregory’s The Constant Princess.

6. Jean Plaidy and Philippa Gregory Fighting for Gender Equality Through Katherine Parr’s Narrative.- 7. Australian Women Writing Tudor Lives.

Part III. Writing the Writer: History, Voyeurism, Victimisation.

8. Biofiction, Compulsory Sexuality, and Celibate Modernism in Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author.

9. In Poe’s Shadow: Frances Sargent Osgood.

10. Stanisława Przybyszewska as a Case of Posthumous Victimisation: On the Ethics of Biofiction.

Part IV. Creativity and Gender in the Arts and Sciences.

11. Re-visiting the Renaissance Virtuosa in Biofiction on Sofonisba Anguissola.

12. The “Mother of the Theory of Relativity”? Re-imagining Mileva Marić in Marie Benedict’s The Other Einstein (2016).

Part V. Queering Biofiction.

13. Visceral Biofiction: Herculine Barbin, Intersex Embodiment, and the Biological Imaginary in Aaron Apps’s Dear Herculine.

14. “A Way Out of the Prison of Gender”: Interview with Novelist Patricia Duncker.

O autorze

Caitríona Ní Dhúill is Professor in German at University College Cork, Ireland. She is the author of Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Sex in Imagined Spaces: Gender and Utopia from More to Bloch (2010). She is co-editor of the journal Austrian Studies, and guest co-editor of a double special issue of Poetics Today (2016) on negative futures. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on gender theory, utopian theory, modernist literature and life writing.                                                 

 

Julia Novak holds a tenure-track professorship for Anglophone Literature and Mediality at the University of Vienna. Her work on life writing and biofiction has appeared in journals such as Biography; Contemporary Women’s Writing; a/b: Auto/Biography Studies; Life Writing; and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. She has co-edited a special issue on “Women’s Lives on Screen” for the European Journal of Life Writing (2021), of which she is an editor, as well as Experiments in Life Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction (Palgrave 2017); Life Writing and Celebrity (Routledge 2020); and the inaugural issue of the Journal of Historical Fictions (2017).

 

Blurb

“This absorbing book makes a rich intervention into historical fi ction, life-writing, and feminist and queer cultural history.” —Ann Heilmann, author of Neo-Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry: A Study in Transgender and Transgenre (2018)

“A fascinating exploration of the intimate interaction of gendered history and biographical fi ction [...] intelligently and incisively interrogates the deliberate use of fi ction to recentre marginalized female historical fi gures.” —Farah Mendlesohn, author of Creating Memory: Historical Fiction and the English Civil Wars (2022)  

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction addresses the current boom in biographical fictions across the globe, examining the ways in which gendered lives of the past become re-imagined as gendered narratives in fiction. It addresses questions of gender in a sustained and systematic manner that is sensitive to cultural and historical differences in both raw material and fictional reworking. It draws on theories of biofiction and historical fiction, life-writing studies, feminist criticism, queer feminist readings, postcolonial studies, feminist art history, and trans studies. Attentive to various approaches to fictionalisation that reclaim, appropriate or re-invent their ‘raw material’, the volume assesses the critical, revisionist and deconstructive potential of biographical fictions while acknowledging the effects of cliché, gender norms and established narratives in many of the texts under investigation.

The introduction of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com 

​Caitríona Ní Dhúill is Professor in German at University College Cork, Ireland. She is the author of Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Sex in Imagined Spaces: Gender and Utopia from More to Bloch (2010). She is co-editor of the journal Austrian Studies, and guest co-editor of a double special issue of Poetics Today (2016) on negative futures. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on gender theory, utopian theory, modernist literature and life writing.                                                 

Julia Novak is an Elise Richter Research Fellow (Austrian Science Fund) at the Department of English, University of Salzburg, Austria, and an editor of the European Journal of Life Writing. She has published two monographs: a book on reading groups, Gemeinsam Lesen (2007) and another titled Live Poetry: An Integrated Approach to Poetry in Performance (2011). She also co-edited the volume Experiments in Life Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.