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The Routledge Companion to Biofiction provides readers with the history, origins, and evolution of this popular genre. Featuring contributions from leading scholars in the field, this authoritative collection foregrounds analyses of biofiction's core foundations through contemporary debates.
List of contents
1. Introduction: negotiating biofiction's territories
Part I: Histories of Biofiction 2. Before biofiction: writing
Bioi in ancient Greece and Rome
3. The concurrent rise of psychology and biofiction
4. Biofiction and ideologies: Columbiads of the eighteenth century
Part II: Theoretical reflections on biofiction5. Person as character
6. Exofiction: a genre between mediatic and literary practices
7. The writer's life: from biography to biofiction
8. Counterfactual biofictions: writing against history
9. Death and dying in biofiction
10. Biofiction as an art of the possible
11. Witness to the unattestable
Part III: Biofiction, national models and (trans)national constructions12. Italian biofiction
13. French biofiction in the twenty-first century
14. Transnationalism and artist biofictions
15. Prominence on stage: interrogating the reality of the self
Part IV: Biofiction as political intervention16. Biofiction's biofabulative edges
17. Perspectivization in postcolonial biofiction: aesthetics, ethics, and politics of multifocal narrative
18. The cultural work of Colonial wives in recent Australian biofictions
Part V: Biofictional case studies19. Haunted by Woolfs: ghosts in new Bloomsbury Group biofiction
20. Virginia Woolf's Poetics of "New Biography" and the Ethics of Woolf-centric Biofiction
21. Biofiction and sport
22. Confronting evil through literature: Bolaño, Pron, and fictional biography's border with biofiction
23. The Jesus biofiction in the twenty-first century
Part VI: Activating lives: early modern women 24. Women artists and agency in biographical fiction
25. Beyond the cage of facts: liberating the subject in Maggie O'Farrell's
Hamnet (2020) and
The Marriage Portrait (2022)
26. Biofiction's overlays and hidden underpaintings in Lauren Groff's
Matrix and Maggie O'Farrell's
The Marriage Portrait27. Women and Shakespeare biofiction
Part VII: Authorial reflections28. What happens to the body is real - Anne Enright, interviewed by Laura Cernat
29. From
Small Lives to Biofiction - Pierre Michon, interviewed by Alexandre Gefen
30. "Strange labyrinth": cultural politics in biofiction about early modern women authors
31. Finding the angle, finding the truth
32. The novel is a fantastic playground - Koen Peeters, interviewed by Laura Cernat
Index
About the author
Lucia Boldrini is Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK and Honorary Professor of Comparative Literature at University College London. She has published on comparative and world literature, biofiction, and modernism and the Middle Ages. Her books include
Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (Routledge, 2012).
Laura Cernat (she/they) is a FWO postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven, Belgium, who has published on biofiction, autofiction and autotheory, cultural memory, Virginia Woolf, and Lucia Joyce, and organized the 2021 conference Biofiction as World Literature.
Alexandre Gefen is "Directeur de Recherche" (Full Research Professor) at the CNRS Theory and History of Modern Art and Literature Laboratory at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, France. He is the author of numerous articles and essays on culture, contemporary literature, and literary theory.
Michael Lackey is Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota, USA, where he teaches courses about twentieth- and twenty-first-century intellectual, political, and literary history. His publications include
Biofiction: An Introduction (Routledge, 2021) and
Biofictional Histories, Mutations, and Forms (Routledge, 2016).
Summary
The Routledge Companion to Biofiction provides readers with the history, origins, and evolution of this popular genre. Featuring contributions from leading scholars in the field, this authoritative collection foregrounds analyses of biofiction's core foundations through contemporary debates.
