Lucia Boldrini, Laura Cernat, Alexandre Gefen, Michael Lackey (éd.), The Routledge Companion to Biofiction

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

List of contributors
Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: negotiating biofiction’s territories
Lucia Boldrini, Laura Cernat, Alexandre Gefen, and Michael Lackey

PART I
Histories of biofiction

2 Before biofiction: writing bioi in ancient Greece and Rome
Nora Goldschmidt

3 The concurrent rise of psychology and biofiction
Michael Lackey

4 Biofiction and ideologies: Columbiads of the eighteenth century
Ina Schabert

PART II
Theoretical reflections on biofiction

5 Person as character
Lucia Boldrini

6 Exofiction: a genre between mediatic and literary practices
Laurent Demanze

7 The writer’s life: from biography to biofiction
Robert Dion

8 Counterfactual biofictions: writing against history
Alison James

9 Death and dying in biofiction
Lorenzo Marchese

10 Biofiction as an art of the possible
Hanna Meretoja

11 Witness to the unattestable
Dominique Rabaté

PART III
Biofiction, national models and (trans)national constructions

12 Italian biofiction
Riccardo Castellana

13 French biofiction in the twenty‑first century
Alexandre Gefen

14 Transnationalism and artist biofictions
Marleen Rensen

15 Prominence on stage: interrogating the reality of the self
Silvia Salino

PART IV

Biofiction as political intervention

16 Biofiction’s biofabulative edges
Vilashini Cooppan

17 Perspectivization in postcolonial biofiction: aesthetics, ethics, and politics of multifocal narrative
Alexandra Effe

18 The cultural work of colonial wives in recent Australian biofictions
Catherine Padmore and Kelly Gardiner

PART V
Biofictional case studies

19 Haunted by Woolfs: ghosts in new Bloomsbury Group biofiction
Todd Avery

20 Virginia Woolf’s poetics of “new biography” and the ethics of Woolf‑entric biofiction
Monica Latham

21 Biofiction and sport
Andreas Gelz

22 Confronting evil through literature: Bolaño, Pron, and fictional biography’s border with biofiction
Katia Ouriachi

23 The Jesus biofiction in the twenty‑first century
Stephanie Russo

PART VI
Activating lives: early modern women

24 Women artists and agency in biographical fiction
Julia Dabbs

25 Beyond the cage of facts: liberating the subject in Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020) and The Marriage Portrait (2022)
Bethany Layne

26 Biofiction’s overlays and hidden underpaintings in Lauren Groff’s Matrix and Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait
Virginia Newhall Rademacher

27 Women and Shakespeare biofiction
Katherine Scheil

PART VII
Authorial reflections

28 What happens to the body is real
Anne Enright, interviewed by Laura Cernat, 31 January 2023

29 From small lives to biofiction
Pierre Michon, Interviewed by Alexandre Gefen, July 2022 (by email)

30 “Strange labyrinth”: cultural politics in biofiction about early modern women authors
Naomi J. Miller

31 Finding the angle, finding the truth
Bárbara Mujica

32 The novel is a fantastic playground
Koen Peeters, interviewed by Laura Cernat, 15 January 2024

Index

Editors

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).