Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-3-031-09021-9
Verlag: Springer

Buch, Englisch, 392 Seiten, Format (B × H): 148 mm x 210 mm, Gewicht: 526 g

Reihe: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing

This volume addresses the current boom in biographical fictions across the globe, examining the ways in which gendered lives of the past become re-imagined as gendered narratives in fiction. Building on this research, this book is the first to address questions of gender in a sustained and systematic manner that is also sensitive to cultural and historical differences in both raw material and fictional reworking. It develops a critical lens through which to approach biofictions as ‘fictions of gender’, drawing on theories of biofiction and historical fiction, life-writing studies, feminist criticism, queer feminist readings, postcolonial studies, feminist art history, and trans studies. Attentive to various approaches to fictionalisation that reclaim, appropriate or re-invent their ‘raw material’, the volume assesses the critical, revisionist and deconstructive potential of biographical fictions while acknowledging the effects of cliché, gender norms and established narratives in manyof the texts under investigation. 
The introduction of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com
Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Novak, Julia

Ní Dhúill, Caitríona

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Geschichtspolitik, Erinnerungskultur
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction: Introduction.- Part I. Recovery, Revision, Ventriloquism: Imagining Historical Women.- 2. “Everything Is Out of Place”: Virginia Woolf, Women, and (Meta-)Historical Biofiction.- 3. Fictional Futures for a Buried Past: Representations of Lucia Joyce.- 4. Imagining Jiang Qing: The Biographer’s Truth in Anchee Min’s Becoming Madame Mao.- Part II. Re-imagining the Early Modern Subject.- 5. From Betrayed Wife to Betraying Wife: Re-writing Katherine of Aragon as Catalina in Philippa Gregory’s The Constant Princess.- 6. Jean Plaidy and Philippa Gregory Fighting for Gender Equality Through Katherine Parr’s Narrative.- 7. Australian Women Writing Tudor Lives.- Part III. Writing the Writer: History, Voyeurism, Victimisation.- 8. Biofiction, Compulsory Sexuality, and Celibate Modernism in Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author.- 9. In Poe’s Shadow: Frances Sargent Osgood.- 10. Stanislawa Przybyszewska as a Case of Posthumous Victimisation: On the Ethics of Biofiction.- Part IV. Creativity and Gender in the Arts and Sciences.- 11. Re-visiting the Renaissance Virtuosa in Biofiction on Sofonisba Anguissola.- 12. The “Mother of the Theory of Relativity”? Re-imagining Mileva Maric´ in Marie Benedict’s The Other Einstein (2016).- Part V. Queering Biofiction.- 13. Visceral Biofiction: Herculine Barbin, Intersex Embodiment, and the Biological Imaginary in Aaron Apps’s Dear Herculine.- 14. “A Way Out of the Prison of Gender”: Interview with Novelist Patricia Duncker.

Über Autor(innen)

Caitríona Ní Dhúill  is Professor in German at University College Cork, Ireland. She is the author of  Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and  Sex in Imagined Spaces: Gender and Utopia from More to Bloch  (2010). She is co-editor of the journal  Austrian Studies , and guest co-editor of a double special issue of  Poetics Today  (2016) on negative futures. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on gender theory, utopian theory, modernist literature and life writing.                                                 

Julia Novak  holds a tenure-track professorship for Anglophone Literature and Mediality at the University of Vienna. Her work on life writing and biofiction has appeared in journals such as  Biography ;  Contemporary Women’s Writing ;  a/b: Auto/Biography Studies ;  Life Writing ; and the  Journal of Postcolonial Writing . She has co-edited a special issue on “Women’s Lives on Screen” for the  European Journal of Life Writing  (2021), of which she is an editor, as well as  Experiments in Life Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction  (Palgrave 2017);  Life Writing and Celebrity  (Routledge 2020); and the inaugural issue of the  Journal of Historical Fictions  (2017).