Short description:

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. 

Long description:

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. 

The volume is organized into seven sections: Histories of biofiction; Theoretical reflections on biofiction; Biofiction, national models and (trans)national constructions; Biofiction as political intervention; Biofictional case studies; Activating lives: early modern women; and Authorial reflections. This groundbreaking collection features works that refine our understanding of the genesis and evolution of biofiction; theorize its unique and distinctive modes of signifying; reflect on its value for the future and social justice; chart new approaches for doing biofictional analysis; and offer insights from authors of biofiction into the creative process.

This is the first collection to bring together the two main schools of interpreting biofiction ? the Francophone and Anglophone ? while also shedding light on biofictions in many languages, from or about many continents, and offering a platform to established and new voices alike. It will be essential reading for students as well as advanced scholars interested in biographical fiction.

Table 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 biofiction

5. 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 constructions

12. 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 intervention

16. 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 studies

19. 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: Bola?o, 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 Portrait

27. Women and Shakespeare biofiction

Part VII: Authorial reflections

28. 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