Academic literature on the topic 'Biofiction'

Abstract: Friedrich Nietzsche is the protagonist of many novels, but for authors of biofictions of the German iconoclast, their Nietzsche is not supposed to be seen as the real Nietzsche. Following Nietzsche's method in Thus Spoke Zarathustra , which is an early and vitally important biofiction, authors of biofiction about Nietzsche use the life of the German philologist to give readers themselves. By analyzing and interpreting Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a biofiction, I show how authors of Nietzsche biofictions fictionalize and metaphorize, rather than represent, the life of Nietzsche in order to project into existence their own vision of life and the world.

In this introduction to the special issue on “Illuminating Lives: The Biographical Impulse in Postcolonial Literatures”, we start by situating the genre of biographical fiction, which has become increasingly popular in postcolonial literatures and beyond, in relation to more “traditional” nonfictional biography. We then examine how postcolonial biofiction might be distinguished from its postmodern avatar, and we tentatively circumscribe some of the tendencies that appear to cluster more systematically in postcolonial biofiction than in other types of writings: the focus on individuals — including artist figures — either forgotten or marginalized in traditional history; the use of the biofictional as a veritable mode of knowledge that allows writers and their critics to explore the philosophical implications of examining human trajectories; and the presence of narrative fragmentation, which often problematizes the possibility of ever fully apprehending an individual life.

Introduction. The present paper deals with the interdiscursivity in postmodern literary biographic narration (biofiction) in which interdiscursivity is viewed as the author’s strategy of text formation. The relevance of the study is conditioned by the interest of modern linguistics in interaction of different discourse types in literary texts. It is also relevant to study different techniques that the English author uses to represent an external linguocultural context, namely, to create the image of a Russian city in the English-language narration. The novelty of the research is implied by the choice of material under examination, as the constitutive elements of biofictional narration have not been fully defined yet.Methodology and sources. The study is drawn on M. Bradbury’s English-language postmodern biofictional novel To the Hermitage. This biofiction depicts D. Diderot’s trip to St. Petersburg, where he was invited by Catherine the Great. It also recounts the adventures of a modern expedition, which came to the same destination to study the French philosopher’s heritage. The research of discourse interaction is based on a methodology, developed by V. Chernyavskaya. It combines traditional methods of stylistic analysis with discourse analysis.Results and discussion. While analysing the literary space of the biofiction, the following “central” discourses have been identified: Russian-culture-oriented discourse of English as well as historical, political, and autobiographical discourses. The narration is also rich in traits of “periphery” discourses, to name just a few: economical, literary, colloquial French, etc. M. Bradbury uses the strategy of simulated interdiscursivity to make a persuasive impact on a reader’s mind, at the same time involving the reader in fact-fiction semantic game.Conclusion. The analysis highlighted here proved the fact that interdiscursivity is one of the dominant mechanisms an author uses to construct biofictional narration. This strategy reflects some key features of postmodern texts, such as blending of literary genres, a playful montage of different discourse types and ironic mode of narration.

Abstract Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after a historical figure, and since the 1990s it has become one of the most dominant literary forms. This is surprising because many prominent scholars, critics, and writers have criticized and even condemned it. This essay hypothesizes that postmodern theories of truth and concomitant transformations in reader sensibilities partly account for the legitimization and now dominance of biofiction. The essay analyzes a 1968 literary debate among Ralph Ellison, William Styron, and Robert Penn Warren, which on the surface concerned the uses of history in literature. But because it happened just one year after the publication of Styron’s controversial novel about Nat Turner, the debate ended up focusing primarily on the nature and value of biofiction. By analyzing the discussion in relation to contemporary formulations about and theorizations of biofiction, this essay illustrates why the forum represents a turning point in literary history, resulting in the decline of a traditional type of literary symbol and the rise of a more anchored and empirical symbol—that is, the type of symbol found in biofiction.

Cette étude se propose de réfléchir sur les sept textes de Françoise Lalande qui se situent aux frontières entre la biographie et la biofiction. Après un bref aperçu théorique sur ces genres narratifs, très importants surtout dès les années 80 et jusqu’à nos jours, nous procéderons à une réorganisation des ouvrages de l’auteure, en fonction de la problématique générique, puisque ces biofictions sont non seulement narratives mais aussi dramatiques et même poétiques. Les différents textes se basent sur la vie, ou des épisodes de vies, des personnages d’un univers culturel qui vont de Jean-Jacques Rousseau à Christian Dotremont. Le présent article considère les procédés de représentation des différents personnages, ainsi que les thèmes ou les préoccupations majeures qui y sont évoqués : a production artistique et sa relation avec le malheur, les pertes de l’enfance, les relations familiales, les amours parfois tragiques, la tentation du suicide, et toujours, la quête d’un bonheur qui se dérobe. Finalement, nous nous demandons ce qui pousse l’auteure à se greffer sur ces vies tourmentées et son éventuel lien avec le reste de son œuvre.

A. S. Byatt’s fiction is much possessed by ‘lives’ – not only the lives of her characters, but the ideas of the biographies of those characters, and of characters as biographers. The essay will explore the relation between fiction, biography and autobiography in her work, taking in such topics as portraiture, myth, creation and reading. It will ask why a novelist who has written about earlier historical periods has eschewed one of the defining devices of the historical novel – and postmodern biofiction – of using real historical figures as characters.

This article is an exploration of the biofictive in Caryl Phillips’s writing, in particular in his novel The Lost Child (2015). The term “biofiction” has been in critical use for some 20 years, but is in general under-theorized. The article intends to help fill that gap by considering the biofictive in Phillips’s work as a form of postcolonial epistemology. It also introduces a new but logical dimension by setting the biofictive in conversation with biopolitics. However, whereas the dominant focus in discussions of the biopolitical (formulations from Foucault to Agamben and beyond) concerns the structures and dispositions of power, the role of the biofictive is inflected differently insofar as it both acknowledges a history of power but also creates a space of narrative alterity and resistance. In Phillips’s work this is revealed both in his nonfiction and fiction, not least where the two are combined; and it is especially evident in the multimodal operations of his fiction, dispersed across time and space in the aftermath of slavery, migration, and empire. We see all this in The Lost Child, which also introduces a complex rereading of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Overall, Phillips’s version of the postcolonial is capacious, intersecting with other forms of post-traumatic and fugitive experience. The biofictive becomes a bona fide form of knowledge in our postcolonial, post-imperial moment.

Cette thèse propose d’analyser un phénomène littéraire contemporain et transnational : la biofiction. La recherche associe une étude historique et littéraire de la pratique de la biographie, une analyse théorique dont elle est investie par la fiction, et une réflexion critique et comparative pour les textes spécifiques contemporains.Une taxinomie des nombreuses et différentes formes du biographique littéraire s’accompagne d’une description des poétiques spécifiques de la biofiction et d’une analyse de ses enjeux littéraires comme de ses implications extra-littéraires (historiques, sociologiques, philosophiques et même politiques) afin d’évaluer sa teneur épistémologique en tant que catégorie interprétative du réel.D'un point de vue méthodologique, le travail croise l’étude de l'évolution historique du genre biographique avec celle de la naissance et du développement de formes hybrides dans la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, en Occident : la combinaison de ces deux recherches (biographie et fiction) vise à retracer une généalogie spécifique pour ce nouveau genre (ou sous-genre) qu’est la biofiction, et ainsi à identifier des textes pionniers, qui anticipent une certaine poétique ou tension esthétique dominante dans la production contemporaine. De plus, cette recherche met en place une analyse comparative de ces textes selon différents critères textuels, à la lumière des instruments, en devenir constant, de la narratologie. En particulier, la thèse se concentre sur le concept de narrateur afin de pouvoir reconnaitre et étudier les différentes typologies de narrateur-biographe présents dans le texte. En interrogeant sa place et ses fonctions dans le texte, il est possible d’identifier les raisons de l’usage du biographique dans les récits contemporains et de vérifier de quelle manière il tente de dire une vérité précise sur un homme particulier.Comme en témoigne le titre de cette thèse, le nœud spécifique qui lie la narration d’une vie et l’énonciation d’une vérité à propos de cette vie représente le cœur de notre chantier de recherche, la clé avec laquelle analyser les œuvres dans leur spécificité et évaluer la façon de concevoir la reconstruction d’une identité et d’une mémoire individuelle et collective, publique et privée
This thesis aims to analyse a contemporary and transnational literary phenomenon: biofiction. The dissertation combines a historical interest in the practice of biography, with a theoretical and analytical perspective for the way in which biographical accounts were invested by fiction, and a critical and comparative attention for specific contemporary texts. A taxonomy proposal of the many different forms of literary biographies is accompanied by the desire to describe the poetics of contemporary biofiction, its literary challenges and its extra-literary implications (historiographical, sociological, philosophical, political): the aim is to evaluate the epistemological and heuristic consistency of biofiction as an interpretative category of reality.From a methodological point of view, the analyses of the millennial evolution of the biographical is followed by the study of the birth and development of hybrid forms in the second half of the twentieth century, in the West, with the purpose of tracing a specific genealogy of the biofictional genre, taking into account the pioneering texts, those that anticipate a certain poetic or dominant aesthetic tension. Subsequently, the work proposes a comparative analysis of some contemporary texts, above all Italian and French, based on different textual criteria and through the tools of narratology. Firstly, the hybrid character, between document and invention, of biofiction (and therefore the coexistence of referential materials and fictional techniques) is evaluated; at the same time, special attention is given to the narrative voice: by questioning the place that it occupies within the story and analysing its function, it is possible to grasp the reasons for the use of biographical discourse in contemporary récits, and at the same time to verify how these kind of narratives try to say a precise and original truth about a particular man.As underlined by the title of the thesis, the specific connection that links the life narrative and the expression of a truth about that life is the heart of this research, the key to analysing biofictional works in their specificity and its ways of conceiving the reconstruction of a particular identity and of individual and collective, public and private memory
Questa tesi intende analizzare un fenomeno letterario contemporaneo e transnazionale: la biofiction. Il lavoro combina un interesse storico per la pratica della biografia, uno teorico e analitico per la maniera con cui essa è stata investita dalla fiction, e uno critico e comparativo per i testi specifici contemporanei. Uno sforzo di tassonomia delle molte e diverse forme del biografico letterario si accompagna alla volontà di descrivere le poetiche particolari della biofiction contemporanea, le sue sfide letterarie e le sue implicazioni extra-letterarie (storiografiche, sociologiche, filosofiche, politiche): il fine è di valutare la consistenza epistemologica ed euristica della biofiction in quanto categoria interpretativa del reale.Da un punto di vista metodologico il lavoro incrocia lo studio dell’evoluzione millenaria del genere biografico con quello sulla nascita e lo sviluppo delle forme ibride nella seconda metà del XX secolo, in Occidente, con l’obiettivo di rintracciare una genealogia specifica del genere biofinzionale e di identificarne i testi pionieri, quelli che anticipano una determinata poetica o tensione estetica oggi dominante. In seguito, il lavoro propone un’analisi comparativa di alcuni testi contemporanei, soprattutto italiani e francesi, sulla base di criteri testuali diversi e attraverso gli strumenti della narratologia. In primo luogo, si è valutato il carattere ibrido, tra documento e invenzione, della biofiction (e quindi la coesistenza di materiali referenziali e di tecniche finzionali); allo stesso tempo, particolare rilevanza ha assunto il concetto di narratore: interrogando il posto che occupa nel racconto e analizzando la sua funzione è infatti possibile cogliere le ragioni dell’uso del biografico nei récits contemporanei, e insieme verificare in quale maniera essi cercano di dire una verità precisa e originale su un uomo particolare. Come testimonia il titolo della tesi, il nodo specifico che lega la narrazione di una vita e l’enunciazione di una verità a proposito di quella vita rappresenta il cuore della ricerca, la chiave con la quale analizzare le opere nella loro specificità e valutarne il modo di concepire la ricostruzione di un’identità particolare e di una memoria individuale e collettiva, pubblica e privata

Cette thèse propose d’analyser un phénomène littéraire contemporain et transnational : la biofiction. La recherche associe une étude historique et littéraire de la pratique de la biographie, une analyse théorique dont elle est investie par la fiction, et une réflexion critique et comparative pour les textes spécifiques contemporains. Une taxinomie des nombreuses et différentes formes du biographique littéraire s’accompagne d’une description des poétiques spécifiques de la biofiction et d’une analyse de ses enjeux littéraires comme de ses implications extra-littéraires (historiques, sociologiques, philosophiques et même politiques) afin d’évaluer sa teneur épistémologique en tant que catégorie interprétative du réel. D’un point de vue méthodologique, le travail croise l’étude de l'évolution historique du genre biographique avec celle de la naissance et du développement de formes hybrides dans la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, en Occident : la combinaison de ces deux recherches (biographie et fiction) vise à retracer une généalogie spécifique pour ce nouveau genre (ou sous-genre) qu’est la biofiction, et ainsi à identifier des textes pionniers, qui anticipent une certaine poétique ou tension esthétique dominante dans la production contemporaine. De plus, cette recherche met en place une analyse comparative de ces textes selon différents critères textuels, à la lumière des instruments, en devenir constant, de la narratologie. En particulier, la thèse se concentre sur le concept de narrateur afin de pouvoir reconnaitre et étudier les différentes typologies de narrateur-biographe présents dans le texte. En interrogeant sa place et ses fonctions dans le texte, il est possible d’identifier les raisons de l’usage du biographique dans les récits contemporains et de vérifier de quelle manière il tente de dire une vérité précise sur un homme particulier.
This thesis aims to analyse a contemporary and transnational literary phenomenon: biofiction. The dissertation combines a historical interest in the practice of biography, with a theoretical and analytical perspective for the way in which biographical accounts were invested by fiction, and a critical and comparative attention for specific contemporary texts. A taxonomy proposal of the many different forms of literary biographies is accompanied by the desire to describe the poetics of contemporary biofiction, its literary challenges and its extra-literary implications (historiographical, sociological, philosophical, political): the aim is to evaluate the epistemological and heuristic consistency of biofiction as an interpretative category of reality. From a methodological point of view, the analyses of the millennial evolution of the biographical is followed by the study of the birth and development of hybrid forms in the second half of the twentieth century, in the West, with the purpose of tracing a specific genealogy of the biofictional genre, taking into account the pioneering texts, those that anticipate a certain poetic or dominant aesthetic tension. Subsequently, the work proposes a comparative analysis of some contemporary texts, above all Italian and French, based on different textual criteria and through the tools of narratology. Firstly, the hybrid character, between document and invention, of biofiction (and therefore the coexistence of referential materials and fictional techniques) is evaluated; at the same time, special attention is given to the narrative voice: by questioning the place that it occupies within the story and analysing its function, it is possible to grasp the reasons for the use of biographical discourse in contemporary récits, and at the same time to verify how these kind of narratives try to say a precise and original truth about a particular man.
Questa tesi intende analizzare un fenomeno letterario contemporaneo e transnazionale: la biofiction. Il lavoro combina un interesse storico per la pratica della biografia, uno teorico e analitico per la maniera con cui essa è stata investita dalla fiction, e uno critico e comparativo per i testi specifici contemporanei. Uno sforzo di tassonomia delle molte e diverse forme del biografico letterario si accompagna alla volontà di descrivere le poetiche particolari della biofiction contemporanea, le sue sfide letterarie e le sue implicazioni extra-letterarie (storiografiche, sociologiche, filosofiche, politiche): il fine è di valutare la consistenza epistemologica ed euristica della biofiction in quanto categoria interpretativa del reale. Da un punto di vista metodologico il lavoro incrocia lo studio dell’evoluzione millenaria del genere biografico con quello sulla nascita e lo sviluppo delle forme ibride nella seconda metà del XX secolo, in Occidente, con l’obiettivo di rintracciare una genealogia specifica del genere biofinzionale e di identificarne i testi pionieri, quelli che anticipano una determinata poetica o tensione estetica oggi dominante. In seguito, il lavoro propone un’analisi comparativa di alcuni testi contemporanei, soprattutto italiani e francesi, sulla base di criteri testuali diversi e attraverso gli strumenti della narratologia. In primo luogo, si è valutato il carattere ibrido, tra documento e invenzione, della biofiction (e quindi la coesistenza di materiali referenziali e di tecniche finzionali); allo stesso tempo, particolare rilevanza ha assunto il concetto di narratore: interrogando il posto che occupa nel racconto e analizzando la sua funzione è infatti possibile cogliere le ragioni dell’uso del biografico nei récits contemporanei, e insieme verificare in quale maniera essi cercano di dire una verità precisa e originale su un uomo particolare.

“Identity” constitutes one of the most debates theoretical concepts in the domain of postcolonial studies. Scholars often have a historical perspective for examining the question of identity in contemporary literary works. In fact, in the last three decades of the 20th century, we notice a significant increase in the number of literary works of an autobiographical and biographical nature. In the contemporary literature, the predominance of “personal narratives” in which reflect on identity, could be attributed to the heightened sense of individuality, which in turn results from the failure of Grand Ideologies, the mass migrations triggered by the processes of decolonization, the alienation of the consumerist society, and the fundamental redefinition of gender roles in the latter half of the 20th century. But during this period, there is also a parallel epistemological shift that takes place, and which is sometimes downplayed in the historical approach of the postcolonial studies. The episode in the history of ideas, known as “the death of the Subject,” is commonly associated with the structuralist movement in the 1950s and 60s. Structuralists argued that the human mind is traversed by omnipresent structures that play a much more significant role in the creative process than the conscious mind. In the case of language for example, it is not we who make use of the language, but rather, it is the language that evolves and produces itself through our mental structures. With language, human agency is also questioned in literary creation. As a result, literary critics take issue with such notions as “self,” and “self-writing,”-or autobiography. In France, the New Novel was the locus for the literary representation of structuralist theories, and played an important role in the formalist movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Using various techniques, the New Novelists sought to annihilate the anthropocentric narration or otherwise underscore the passive experience of reality by the Subject. The result was a highly formalist type of novels, predominant in the 50s and 60s, drawing mostly an elite intellectual readership. But May 1968 events marked a departure from the structuralist ideology in general, and the literary esthetics of the New Novel in particular. This political, social, and cultural upheaval in France was a ramification of the global student movement against institutional apparatuses and different forms of political establishment. In France, it was also a reaction to the elitist academism that denied the “human,” and to a literary expression that negated individuals and their personal stories. May 1968 protests objected to the monopoly of elite institutions on discourse and knowledge, and that they aspired to a “democratization” of discourse. The increase in the number of autobiographical and biographical works after 1970s, could therefore be viewed as a dialectical response to the formalism of the New Novel. This epistemological shift opened up the discursive space for narratives of “self” and “identity.” These narratives document a highly subjective experience of reality in a rapidly-changing world. Most importantly, they reflect the preoccupations of the contemporary individual as well as the transformations of the social life, and as such, narratives of family, exile, sexuality, and quotidian abound. The personalization of the experience goes so far as to call into question the very meaning of reality and History, and thus the “referential” genres autobiography and biography are new writing practices “autofiction” and “biofiction” which maintain an ambiguous rapport with the referential reality.

Vers le début des années 80, on assiste, sur la scène littéraire française, à un renouveau romanesque que le Nouveau Roman, trop centré sur les jeux de langage, semblait avoir démodé. On assiste également à une résurgence du roman réaliste, social, musical, policier et d’aventures. C’est précisément cette problématique du retour, notamment celui du roman d’aventures, que cette thèse tente d’exposer et surtout d’interroger à travers l’étude de l'oeuvre très représentative d’Echenoz. En renouant avec le genre classique, notre auteur n’hésite pas à en modifier la configuration et les enjeux. La mise au jour de ceux-ci nous permet d’élaborer une poétique du récit d’aventures postmoderne. Telle est la finalité de cette étude : revisiter les lieux d’un genre traditionnel ressuscité pour en dégager les formes et les enjeux contemporains. Mais à cet objectif, s’en ajoute un autre de plus large envergure : parcourir via l’étude du genre, les tribulations de la fiction échenozienne qui n’hésite pas à bifurquer d’un genre à l’autre, à chavirer entre deux espace-temps et à se thématiser dans une écriture elle-même périlleuse, toujours prête à malmener son lecteur totalement démuni face à l’audace débridée de son auteur et aux déroutantes perturbations de la narration et de l’œuvre
Since 1980, the literary scene in France has witnessed a revival of romance once made obsolete by the New Novel (Nouveau Roman). Realistic, social, musical, crime, spy and adventure fiction has thus sprung up again. The current study examines and questions the problematic of “return” especially the return of adventure fiction in the very representative work of Jean Echenoz. Thought reviving a classical genre, the author does not shy away from modifying and remodeling that genre’s configurations and issues. Thus, this survey elaborates a poetic of the postmodern fiction of adventures, revisiting a traditional genre to extract contemporary forms and issues, so to speak. But from a broader perspective, the study underscores the tribulations of Echenoz’s fiction, work which does not mind to collapse plots, oscillate from one genre to another or sway between two space-times, at the risk of presenting itself in a turbulent mode of writing confounding the reader - who fells helpless in the face of the unbridled audacity of the author and his narrative perturbations

This dissertation analyses Ermanno Rea’s Mistero napoletano (1995), Walter Siti’s Troppi paradisi (2006) and Wu Ming 2 & Antar Mohamed’s Timira. Romanzo meticcio (2012) as three case-studies of how writing connected to personal experiences and essayistic genres are combined in such a way as to give way to what can be defined as a first-person essay-novel. This literary form can also be considered as a typical example of what the literary scholar Raffaele Donnarumma has called “hypermodernity” in contemporary Italian literature, a multifaceted literary trend consisting in the critical and creative exploration of the possible interactions between literary forms and societal issues. The expression “personal experience writing” is used for a broad variety of life-writing, ranging from “traditional” forms of autobiography, biography and diary entries to creative literary adaptations of these forms (autofiction, biofiction, narrative diary). The “essayistic writing” that has been addressed include a wide set of discursive and argumentative modules through which authors elaborate and reflect on the literary, cultural, political and social contexts with which they interact as creative writers.

Cette thèse explore un corpus de romans contemporains qui ont en commun la réécriture de Charles Dickens, l’œuvre et l’homme. Dans ces romans, l’Inimitable apparait tantôt sous les traits du détective, tantôt sous ceux du criminel. Ces portraits de Dickens nous amènent à nous interroger sur l’usage des modalités de la détection dans les romans néo Victoriens qui réécrivent l’auteur. Cette thèse vise à démontrer que la détection est partie intégrante du roman néo-Dickensien (et, par extension, du roman néo Victorien), offrant une autre façon de concevoir la double structure temporelle caractéristique du genre ainsi que le rapport à l’intertextualité. Le premier chapitre offre une réflexion sur la lecture et la représentation de l’espace, en particulier, la ville, Londres, que l’on comprend ici non pas comme reflet de la réalité historique mais comme appropriation du Londres fictionnel de Dickens. Mon étude de la relation entre le lieu et l’espace s’appuie sur les théories de Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) et de Franco Moretti (1998). Ce dernier permet de voir comment les romans postcoloniaux réécrivent et renversent la topographie des romans victoriens. Se pose également la question de la biofiction. Si les historiens et biographes peuvent être considérés comme des sortes de détectives, les auteurs néo-Victoriens ayant recours à la biofiction sont des détectives qui déforment, remettent en question et jouent avec les faits historiques, ce qui les amène à créer des intrigues alternatives et inquiétantes. Le néo Victorianisme créée sa propre critique au fur et à mesure, en défiant et taquinant les critiques qui eux n’ont guère d’autre choix que de plonger et démêler ces énigmes intertextuelles
This thesis concerns a body of contemporary novels which all use Charles Dickens’s works as hypotext while also featuring the Victorian author amongst their cast of characters. In these novels, the Inimitable is either presented as a detective, or as a criminal figure, or both. Drawing upon both Detective Fiction and Neo-Victorian Studies, the present work shows how the neo-Dickensian novel (and neo-Victorianism at large) may be thought of in terms of a detective mode, which provides a framework that enables a renegotiation of intertextuality. Neo-Victorian fiction is fascinated with the emergence of the city as the site of modernity, of a shattered, threatened identity. From the crowded streets the figure of the flâneur emerges first, soon to be followed by that of the detective. Neo-Dickensian novels exhume the Victorian, or rather Dickensian London, to immerse their readers in this re-constructed past. The study of the relation to space and place draws upon Yi-Fu Tuan’s theory (1977) but also Franco Moretti’s (1998), which enables to see that in novels from the Antipodes, the topographical plots of the nineteenth century are reversed. The texts under study not only invest the Dickensian city but Dickens himself through the use of biofiction. If historians and biographers may be thought of as detectives of a kind, then neo-Victorian writers engaging in biofiction are detectives who distort, play with and question the historical facts that they encounter thereby revealing uncanny but also alternative plots. Neo-Victorianism creates its own criticism as it goes and thus challenges, teases its critics who have no choice but to try and go through with these riddles

This thesis addresses a new mode of contemporary writing: the biographical fictions about authors that have proliferated over the last ten-to-fifteen years. I find antecedents for this subgenre in two active areas: metafiction’s troubling of the boundary between first- and second-order discourses, and Neo-Victorianism’s recovery of the subject. I use the phrase ‘(Post)Modernist Biofiction’ to describe these novels. The parenthetical ‘(post)’ refers both to my subjects’ chronological positioning pre, mid, and post Modernism, and to the genre’s partial engagement with theoretical developments. This selective engagement is borne out by the compound noun ‘biofiction’, which raises a tension between embodied and textual subjectivity. Critical interest has kept pace with the flourishing of biofiction, with articles and book chapters multiplying around certain novels. I contribute to this emerging field in one of the first studies to consider biofiction as a genre. I discuss three popular subjects, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath, and their manifestation in sixteen primary texts, considering examples of the literary biopic and the lyric memoir alongside the novel, and the more popular biofictions alongside the critically overlooked. In doing so, I adopt an intertextual approach, which places the biofictions in dialogue with their subjects’ work. I have three main avenues of exploration: the first, to consider how biofiction might serve to introduce or to recall its subjects’ texts; the second, to ask whether biofiction might contribute to scholarly discourse as well as borrowing from the same; and the third, to address biofiction’s intervention into postmodernist debates about subjectivity. On the whole, the works of biofiction considered in this thesis do not, I argue, naïvely resurrect the Author-God rejected by Roland Barthes. Instead, their intertextuality fragments that figure, enabling a sophisticated recovery of subjectivity as it exists in the form of discourse.

Les trois romans présentés dans ce travail sont des exemples tardifs de la littérature mimétique, visant à reproduire la réalité passée, à l'expliquer, et, finalement, à en devenir l'unique témoin : ils en sont la bibliothèque de vie. La vie de l'empereur lettré Hadrien, au IIe siècle de notre ère, qui exerce sa liberté individuelle et tente d'étendre celle-ci au monde civilisé, celle des nobles siciliens et polonais qui, au XIXe siècle, tentent de survivre aux changements politiques et de s'intégrer, de façon critique et réfléchie, à la nouvelle société, sont des vies littérarisées de personnages issus de la réalité. Le texte biographique, pour faire revivre ces temps révolus, s'appuie sur un vaste hypotexte, mêlant l'expérience personnelle, autobiographique, et littéraire aux faits historiques érudits. Cette alliance romanesque du lyrisme et de l'épique est au centre de la bibliothèque de vie, en ce sens que celle-ci élabore une vision du monde dans laquelle le lecteur, l'autre moi du corpus biographique, est invité à agir à son tour, à s'interroger sur le monde présent et à s'y investir. La bibliothèque de vie est ainsi l'image d'un monde passé ouvert sur le futur, dans lequel l'individu-lecteur devient un être libre et responsable
The three novels presented in this work are late examples of mimetic literature. Their purpose is to demonstrate former realities, to explain them and, ultimately, to have them bear witness to the ‘library of life'. During the second century, the literary emperor Hadrian, exercised his personal freedom and tried to extend it over the civilised world; during the nineteenth century, Sicilian and Polish nobles employed critical thought in their attempt to survive political upheaval and enable them to become integrated into new society. These are literary lives of people drawn from reality. The biographical text, used to relive these past times, is based on a vast hypo text combining personal, autobiographical and literary evidence with scholarly historical facts. This romantic alliance of lyricism with epic events forms the core of the ‘library of life'. It elaborates a vision of the world in which the reader, the other element of the biographical corpus, is invited to act, to question the present world and to invest themselves in it. As such, the ‘library of life' is an opening to a past world but which provides a window onto a future world in which the individual is both a free and responsible being

Charles Dickens sought to control the narratives of everyone he encountered, both in life and on the page. He even edited his own identity by burning both his correspondence and an early attempt at autobiography. Dickens’s reputation has since become public domain, however, and neo-Victorian authors are re-imagining the Dickensian. Scholarship has previously examined Dickens’s notorious fusing of fact and fiction, his angst about legacy, and his shifting authorial identity. However, what has not been made explicit is how these concerns manifest in a curious pattern, wherein Dickens’s professed protagonists—the ostensible hero/ine/s of their respective texts—are often deposed; overshadowed, as it were, in their own life histories. I trace this trend through Dickens’s novels self-consciously exhibiting the tenets of life-writing—which I refer to as his life-writing novels—including David Copperfield’s (fictional) autobiography, the memoirs of Mr. Pickwick and Oliver Twist, and Little Dorrit’s biography. Such a focus privileges the life-writing of Dickens’s most famous characters, through whom he asked to be remembered. Invoking Dickens’s early anxieties about his authorial identity, and his later anxieties over his “lost [autobiographical] courage,” I analyse the implications of this Dickensian hero-protagonist split. Dickens enlisted these life-writing novels as sites to rehearse composing a successful life story—thereby engaging in “biographilia”—but bizarrely, his central characters are continually compromised. I subsequently probe the tension between Dickens’s fixation upon legacy, and the ongoing neo-Victorian penchant for biofictionally re-constituting the eminent Victorian author; he could not retain narrative control forever. Nonetheless, Dickens was captivated by the consequences of being (or not being) “the hero of my own life,” to quote David Copperfield. These (thesis) pages must therefore show the complexities inherent in this examination, which expands our understanding both of an anxious Dickens, and of his characters—through whom he attempted to construct and control his legacy.

This thesis deals with those contemporary novels, known as biofictions, which not only rewrite the lives of historical, canonical authors in a fictional way, but also engage in a dialogue with their precursors’ texts. Biofictions have extended the tradition of life writing and, through the practice of rewriting, have made a significant contribution to reading the past in relation to the present. Since, in recent years, Virginia Woolf has been the protagonist of many biofictions and several of her novels and themes have been reworked in a variety of different ways, I chose to investigate the reason for her appeal to contemporary tastes. Thus, I focused on her most autobiographical novel, To the Lighthouse, in which Virginia Woolf openly drew inspiration from her own life experience, her memories and feelings, and transformed biographical facts into fiction, so much so that it is certainly a novel about her family, childhood and her struggles to become an artist. My choice was guided by the awareness that life writing has been reconfigured from a postmodernist perspective, and, since Woolf’s life and work are continuously being rewritten, I wanted to examine whether To the Lighthouse, a personal real life history rewritten as fiction, could be read as an antecedent of contemporary biofictions. Virginia Woolf herself, in fact, engaged with the question of life writing, extended its range and explored the relationship between auto/biography and fiction, a tradition that Postmodernism has further developed. To the Lighthouse uses auto/biography, but extends its limits and turns it into something between biography and fiction. Virginia Woolf borrows elements and events from her own life and “recycles” them to offer her own vision of the world, to the extent that To the Lighthouse can be read both as pure fiction and as fictional autobiography. The effects of Woolf’s experiments in life writing and of her blurring the rigid borders between fact and fiction are central to those postmodernist novels, which deal with the complex relationship between life and fiction. Her novel is definitely a work of fiction, but I argue that being so full of both life (bio) and personal history, it allows us to draw a connection between her form of life writing and contemporary biofictions. I hope to contribute to this field by discussing two postmodernist biofictions: Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan and Susan Sellers’ Vanessa and Virginia, which I read not only as an evident rewriting of Woolf’s life, but also as a dialogue, more or less obvious, with To the Lighthouse. In doing so, I adopt an intertextual approach, which places these biofictions in relation not only to Woolf’s life, but also to her novel. I follow two main routes of exploration: the first is to see how in To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf mixes real facts from her life with events and thoughts she only imagines, thus creating a work of fiction. The second is to see how the two postmodernist novels, the object of this thesis, bestride two fields: the bio-fictional, which engages with Woolf’s life, mixes real and imaginary experiences and recreates her thoughts, and the intertextual, which engages significantly with Woolf’s work, namely with To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf in Manhattan and Vanessa and Virginia, with their many references to To the Lighthouse illuminate Woolf’s continuous interest in life writing, which she revealed in many essays and her significant experiment in “using” life in her novel. Thus, they make a contribution to the refashioning of To the Lighthouse: both novels centre around such themes as family ties, personal losses, the effort that artistic creation requires and the value of fame, which are pivotal in To the Lighthouse and adopt Woolf’s pioneering technique of exploring the inner life of her characters. Their books are thought-provoking and raise serious questions about our relationship with Virginia Woolf and, more specifically, with To the Lighthouse.

The essays in this volume analyze strategies adopted by contemporary novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, and biographers interested in bringing the stories of early modern women to modern audiences. It also pays attention to the historical women creators themselves, who, be they saints or midwives, visual artists or poets and playwrights, stand out for their roles as active practitioners of their own arts and for their accomplishments as creators. Whether they delivered infants or governed as monarchs, or produced embroideries, letters, paintings or poems, their visions, the authors argue, have endured across the centuries. As the title of the volume suggests, the essays gathered here participate in a wider conversation about the relation between biography, historical fiction, and the growing field of biofiction (that is, contemporary fictionalizations of historical figures), and explore the complicated interconnections between celebrating early modern women and perpetuating popular stereotypes about them.

The concept of the literary canon is one of the most debated and controversial in the western intellectual tradition. This book offers ten contributions by Italian scholars of Anglo-American culture addressing the way in which the concept of the literary canon holds out against areas traditionally considered as external or extraneous to it. The essays range over different topics: the etymological analysis of the term "canon"; the relations between canon and performativity; paraliterature – a universe populated by non-hierarchic genres; the relations between post-colonial literature and the canon; postmodern biofiction; studies on translation and finally gay and lesbian literature. The book ends with a meditation on the innovations wrought on the Anglo-American canon by the virtual world of Internet and with a reading proposal originating from a different area of literary studies. Taken as a whole, the intention of the book is to pave the way to democratisation and pluralism in literary studies, going beyond the limitations set by the traditional scale of values of the "western canon". It proposes a frequentation of the geographical and cultural borderlines and hence of the areas of resistance that such borderlines pose to the dominant conceptual hierarchies within and around us, enabling us to glimpse an original future for literature and for western culture in a broader sense.