Download or read book Biofiction written by Michael Lackey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biofiction: An Introduction provides readers with the history, origins, evolution, and legitimization of biofiction, suggesting potential lines of inquiry, exploring criticisms of the literary form, and modeling the process of analyzing and interpreting individual texts. Written for undergraduate and graduate students, this volume combines comprehensive coverage of the core foundations of biofiction with contemporary and lively debates within the subject. The volume aims to confront and illuminate the following questions: • When did biofiction come into being? • What forces gave birth to it? • How does it uniquely function and signify? • Why has it become such a dominant aesthetic form in recent years? This introduction will give readers a framework for evaluating specific biofictions from writers as varied as Friedrich Nietzsche, George Moore, Zora Neale Hurston, William Styron, Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates, and Colm Tóibín, thus enabling readers to assess the value and impact of individual works on the culture at large. Spanning nineteenth-century origins to contemporary debates and adaptations, this book not only equips the reader with a firm grounding in the fundamentals of biofiction but also provides a valuable guide to the uncanny power of the biographical novel to transform cultural attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs.
Download or read book Biofiction and Writers Afterlives written by Bethany Layne and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-06-25 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twelve essays collected in this work explore the afterlives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers in biographical fiction, or biofiction, and its sister genre, the biopic. The essays situate these genres in relation to their generic, cultural, and ideological contexts, and are organised into four groups. The first locates the origins of biofiction in the historical novel, and in Modernist experiments in life writing, while the second consists of case studies of biofiction about writers from the long nineteenth century: Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Rupert Brooke. A guest essay by novelist Maggie Gee opens the third group, which analyses the fertile sub-genre of biographical novels about Woolf, while the fourth and final part of the book concerns the related genre of the biopic. The volume is comprised entirely of original commissions, whose authors include postgraduate students, practitioners and specialists in biographical writing. It will appeal to undergraduates and postgraduates on life writing and contemporary literature modules, as well as fans of the featured biographical novelists and their subjects.
Download or read book Neo Victorian Biofiction written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-09-07 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highlighting neo-Victorian biofiction’s crucial role in reimagining and augmenting the historical archive, this volume explores the complex ethical consequences of a creative movement of historiographic revisionism, combining biography and fiction in a dialectic tension of empathy and voyeuristic spectacle.
Download or read book Ireland the Irish and the Rise of Biofiction written by Michael Lackey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure, and it has become a dominant literary form over the last 35 years. What has not yet been scholarly acknowledged or documented is that the Irish played a crucial role in the origins, evolution, rise, and now dominance of biofiction. Michael Lackey first examines the groundbreaking biofictions that Oscar Wilde and George Moore authored in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as the best biographical novels about Wilde (by Peter Ackroyd and Colm Tóibín). He then focuses on contemporary authors of biofiction (Sabina Murray, Graham Shelby, Anne Enright, and Mario Vargas Llosa, who Lackey has interviewed for this work) who use the lives of prominent Irish figures (Roger Casement and Eliza Lynch) to explore the challenges of seizing and securing a life-promoting form of agency within a colonial and patriarchal context. In conclusion, Lackey briefly analyzes biographical novels by Peter Carey and Mary Morrissy to illustrate why agency is of central importance for the Irish, and why that focus mandated the rise of the biographical novel, a literary form that mirrors the constructed Irish interior.
Download or read book Shakespearean Biofiction on the Contemporary Stage and Screen written by Edel Semple and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-11-02 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first edited collection to explore Shakespeare's life as depicted on the modern stage and screen. Focusing on the years 1998-2023, it uniquely identifies a 25-year trend for depicting Shakespeare, his family and his social circle in theatre, film and television. Interrogating Shakespeare's afterlife across stage and screen media, the volume explores continuities and changes in the form since the release of Shakespeare in Love, which it positions as the progenitor of recent Shakespearean biofictions in Anglo-American culture. It traces these developments through the 21st century, from pivotal moments such as the Shakespeare 400 celebrations in 2016, up to the quatercentenary of the publication of the First Folio, whose portrait helped make the author a globally recognisable icon. The collection takes account of recent Anglo-American socio-political, cultural and literary concerns including feminism, digital media and the biopic and superhero genres. The wide variety of works discussed range from All is True and Hamnet to Upstart Crow, Bill and even The Lego Movie. Offering insights from actors, dramatists and literary and performance scholars, it considers why artists are drawn to Shakespeare as a character and how theatre and screen media mediate his status as literary genius.
Download or read book Biofictions written by Martin Middeke and published by Camden House. This book was released on 1999 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biofictions sets out to explore this renewed interest in Romantic artist-figures in the context of the current renaissance of "life-writing."
Download or read book Biofictions written by Lejla Kucukalic and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-22 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biofictions introduces three novel concepts: ‘biofiction,’ ‘bioimagination,’ and ‘biodiscourse’ to talk about intersections of literary and visual texts and biotechnology. The book proposes a new interdisciplinary area of research that correlates processes of genetics and literature, based on two critical approaches. One, drawing parallels between the genetic codes, human language, formal (binary) language, and posthuman communication and the role of meaning and imagination in these forms of communication. Two, by defining ‘biofictions’ as a critical scientific-artistic concept and as a corpus of texts that engage ideas and developments in molecular biology. Syncretic connection between biotechnology and literature is especially evident in an open science movement and the literary artistic genre of biopunk, discussed across chapters. The study includes well-known contemporary texts, such as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, that are recontextualized as biofiction; it offers a rereading of important but neglected novels such as Thomas Disch’s Camp Concentration (1967); and it analyzes new visual texts such as the TV series Altered Carbon and Ghost in the Shell films. Based on these wide-ranging examples and new critical concepts, the book argues that coming up with possible alterations for the genetic code or intended traits for the organism is a discursive practice that brings into being bionarratives that are both organic and literary. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Download or read book Biofictional Histories Mutations and Forms written by Michael Lackey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biofiction, defined as literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure, first became popular in the 1930s, but over the last forty years it has become a dominant literary form. Prominent writers such as J.M. Coetzee, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Julia Alvarez, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel, Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, Colum McCann, and Michael Cunningham have authored spectacular biographical novels which have won some of the world’s most prestigious awards for fiction. However, in spite of the prominence of these authors, works, and awards, there has been considerable confusion about the nature of biofiction. This collection of process pieces and academic essays from authors and scholars of biofiction defines the nature of the aesthetic form, clarifies why it has come into being, specifies what it is uniquely capable of signifying, illustrates how it pictures the historical and critiques the political, and suggests potential directions for future studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.
Download or read book Word Freak written by Stefan Fatsis and published by HMH. This book was released on 2001-07-07 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “marvelously absorbing” book is “a walk on the wild side of words and ventures into the zone where language and mathematics intersect” (San Jose Mercury News). A former Wall Street Journal reporter and NPR regular, Stefan Fatsis recounts his remarkable rise through the ranks of elite Scrabble players while exploring the game’s strange, potent hold over them—and him. At least thirty million American homes have a Scrabble set—but the game’s most talented competitors inhabit a sphere far removed from the masses of “living room players.” Theirs is a surprisingly diverse subculture whose stars include a vitamin-popping standup comic; a former bank teller whose intestinal troubles earned him the nickname “G.I. Joel”; a burly, unemployed African American from Baltimore’s inner city; the three-time national champion who plays according to Zen principles; and the author himself, who over the course of the book is transformed from a curious reporter to a confirmed Scrabble nut. Fatsis begins by haunting the gritty corner of a Greenwich Village park where pickup Scrabble games can be found whenever weather permits. His curiosity soon morphs into compulsion, as he sets about memorizing thousands of obscure words and fills his evenings with solo Scrabble played on his living room floor. Before long he finds himself at tournaments, socializing—and competing—with Scrabble’s elite. But this book is about more than hardcore Scrabblers, for the game yields insights into realms as disparate as linguistics, psychology, and mathematics. Word Freak extends its reach even farther, pondering the light Scrabble throws on such notions as brilliance, memory, competition, failure, and hope. It is a geography of obsession that celebrates the uncanny powers locked in all of us, “a can’t-put-it-down narrative that dances between memoir and reportage” (Los Angeles Times). “Funny, thoughtful, character-rich, unchallengeably winning writing.” —The Atlantic Monthly This edition includes a new afterword by the author.
Download or read book Biofictions written by Josie Gill and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Winner of the 2020 British Society for Literature and Science book prize. In this important interdisciplinary study, Josie Gill explores how the contemporary novel has drawn upon, and intervened in, debates about race in late 20th and 21st century genetic science. Reading works by leading contemporary writers including Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Octavia Butler and Colson Whitehead, Biofictions demonstrates how ideas of race are produced at the intersection of science and fiction, which together create the stories about identity, racism, ancestry and kinship which characterize our understanding of race today. By highlighting the role of narrative in the formation of racial ideas in science, this book calls into question the apparent anti-racism of contemporary genetics, which functions narratively, rather than factually or objectively, within the racialized contexts in which it is embedded. In so doing, Biofictions compels us to rethink the long-asked question of whether race is a biological fact or a fiction, calling instead for a new understanding of the relationship between race, science and fiction.
Download or read book Afterlives of the Roman Poets written by Nora Goldschmidt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conscious of ancient modes of reading poetry 'for the life', Roman poets encoded versions of their lives into their texts. The result is a body of literature that cries out to be read in terms of lives in reception. Afterlives of the Roman Poets shows how the fictional biographies (or 'biofictions') of its authors have shaped the reception of Latin poetry. From medieval biographies of Ovid inscribed in the margins of his texts to republican readings of Lucan's death in periods of revolution to the 'death of the author' in Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil, the book tells a cultural history of the reception of ancient literature as imagined through the lens of poets' lives. Putting modern life-writing studies and ancient poetry into dialogue, it brings biofictional reception to debates in classics, and puts antiquity and its reception onto the map of modern studies in life-writing.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Neo Victorianism written by Brenda Ayres and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024-01-20 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook offers analysis of diverse genres and media of neo-Victorianism, including film and television adaptations of Victorian texts, authors’ life stories, graphic novels, and contemporary fiction set in the nineteenth century. Contextualized by Sarah E Maier and Brenda Ayres in a comprehensive introduction, the collection describes current trends in neo-Victorian scholarship of novels, film, theatre, crime, empire/postcolonialism, Gothic, materiality, religion and science, amongst others. A variety of scholars from around the world contribute to this volume by applying an assortment of theoretical approaches and interdisciplinary focus in their critique of a wide range of narratives—from early neo-Victorian texts such as A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1963) and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) to recent steampunk, from musical theatre to slumming, and from The Alienist to queerness—in their investigation of how this fiction reconstructs the past, informed by and reinforming the present.
Download or read book Sally Hemings written by Barbara Chase-Riboud and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fictional account of the relationship between American statesman Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings.
Download or read book Conversations with Biographical Novelists written by Michael Lackey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does a writer approach a novel about a real person? In this new collection of interviews, authors such as Emma Donoghue, David Ebershoff, David Lodge, Colum McCann, Colm Tóibín, and Olga Tokarczuk sit down with literary scholars to discuss the relationship of history, truth, and fiction. Taken together, these conversations clarify how the biographical novel encourages cross-cultural dialogue, promotes new ways of thinking about history, politics, and social justice, and allows us to journey into the interior world of influential and remarkable people.
Download or read book The Biographical Turn written by Hans Renders and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Biographical Turn showcases the latest research through which the field of biography is being explored. Fifteen leading scholars in the field present the biographical perspective as a scholarly research methodology, investigating the consequences of this bottom-up approach and illuminating its value for different disciplines. While biography has been on the rise in academia since the 1980s, this volume highlights the theoretical implications of the biographical turn that is changing the humanities. Chapters cover subjects such as gender, religion, race, new media and microhistory, presenting biography as as a research methodology suited not only for historians but also for explorations in areas including literature studies, sociology, economics and politics. By emphasizing agency, the use of primary sources and the critical analysis of context and historiography, this book demonstrates how biography can function as a scholarly methodology for a wide range of topics and fields of research. International in scope, The Biographical Turn emphasizes that the individual can have a lasting impact on the past and that lives that are now forgotten can be as important for the historical narrative as the biographies of kings and presidents. It is a valuable resource for all students of biography, history and historical theory.
Download or read book Kasturba Gandhi written by Giriraj Kishore and published by Niyogi Books. This book was released on 2018-08-16 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kasturba Gandhi is the fictionalised biography of Kasturba Gandhi, a lady as strong and great as Mahatma Gandhi. A lady who earned a place in history because of her personal sacrifices and strength of conviction in what was right as much as on account of being the wife of Mahatma Gandhi in his fight for basic human rights for Indians in South Africa and the Indian Freedom Movement. She was the first Indian woman who voluntarily faced a jail sentence in a foreign soil – in South Africa – in her fight for basic rights for Indian women. The book gives a glimpse of how a strong woman can empower herself staying within the folds of tradition and convention. It offers a rarely portrayed facet of Gandhi – a family man, a father, a husband. It shows how his transformation from Mr Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to Mahatma Gandhi happened with the support of a woman who was a silent partner in the struggle. How she let him realise his larger goals at a cost to herself and family in the larger interests of mankind. How she willingly courted jail terms in Africa, an alien land with no grip on the language and keeping her vegetarian habits intact. How she took up the causes started by Bapu, when he was jailed in India and was imprisoned. How she breathed her last in jail - in Agha Khan Palace where she was jailed last.
Download or read book Virginia Woolf s Afterlives written by Monica Latham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-30 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores Virginia Woolf’s afterlives in contemporary biographical novels and drama. It offers an extensive analysis of a wide array of literary productions in which Virginia Woolf appears as a fictional character or a dramatis persona. It examines how Woolf’s physical and psychological features, as well as the values she stood for, are magnified, reinforced or distorted to serve the authors’ specific agendas. Beyond general theoretical issues about this flourishing genre, this study raises specific questions about the literary and cultural relevance of Woolf’s fictional representations. These contemporary narratives inform us about Woolf’s iconicity, but they also mirror our current literary, cultural and political concerns. Based on a close examination of twenty-five works published between 1972 and 2019, the book surveys various portraits of Woolf as a feminist, pacifist, troubled genius, gifted innovative writer, treacherous, competitive sister and tragic, suicidal character, or, on the contrary, as a caricatural comic spirit, inspirational figure and perspicacious amateur sleuth. By resurrecting Virginia Woolf in contemporary biofiction, whether to enhance or debunk stereotypes about the historical figure, the authors studied here contribute to her continuous reinvention. Their diverse fictional portraits constitute a way to reinforce Woolf’s literary status, re-evaluate her work, rejuvenate critical interpretations and augment her cultural capital in the twenty-first century
