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This investigation of four biographical narratives on the same person, all published since 2018 and inspired by the same epistolary corpus, demonstrates differences in authorial purpose and reader expectation across the ‘speculative spectrum’ of biographical interpretation. The subject, Elizabeth Macarthur, arrived in New South Wales in 1790. Two of the texts are works of historical scholarship, with apublishers’ classification non-fiction biography. The other two are published as novels. The authors’ differing purposes, their interpretations and their stylistic treatments of the same source material, provide an illustrative demonstration of the narrative functions of biography and biofiction. This essay examines the depiction of Elizabeth Macarthur’s life in the four texts to highlight the differences between scholarly biographies and biofictions from the perspective of their writing practices. It examines their use of speculation and literary devices and how these are signposted to the reader by evaluating the authors’ engagement with archival sources, their use of empathy and projection and their narrative techniques. It questions how biofiction can supplement or supplant traditional biography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines adaptation of Lili Elbe’s life story in David Ebershoff’s biofiction novel The Danish Girl (2000). Elbe was a Danish artist who was one of the first individuals to undergo gender-affirming surgery in 1930. Developing an analysis of relational movement, the article traces the way in which Ebershoff’s novel narrates a transition story—a story of a person changing their expression and presentation of gender. This article’s analysis of relational movement focuses on how the narrative of this novel moves the reader through engaging moments. The article argues that these engaging moments allow a nuanced way of understanding transition. By highlighting the centrality of the embodied experience, the relational movement helps the reader to imagine and feel the process of transition and the embodied experience of gender more intensively. This movement is an integral part of a story of transition, which ultimately involves sense-making across a historical period during which stories of trans identification became conceivable and mutated to allow for a wider discourse and changing understanding of gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the background of the 100th anniversary of Franz Kafka's death, the article explores a branch of author-as-character fiction that escapes the generic restraints of biography and biofiction: unchained writer fiction. Using Steven Soderbergh's film Kafka (1991), filmmaker Gil Kofman's novel debut aKa (2023), and Haruki Murakami's global bestseller Kafka on the Shore (2002/2005) as a provisional sample, different modes of unchaining Kafka from the fetters of biography and biofiction are brought to light and contrasted against each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jude Morgan's novel, The Secret Life of William Shakespeare, is a work of biofiction that deals with the playwright's life from shortly before he met Anne Hathaway up to the year 1603, highlighting private aspects such as the relationships with his family and friends - and even his rivals. At the same time, the novel offers an insight into the Elizabethan world in which William Shakespeare lived and rose to fame, actually a pretext to bring to the foreground timeless issues which characterise today's world as well. The portrayal offered by Morgan is, therefore, one that aims to reconcile the two personas of the Bard - the family man and the poet and playwright. The present paper aims to analyse how those aspects are put forward by the novel, relying on features of postmodernism and the biographical novel, as the author attempts to fill in the gaps in Shakespeare's life narrative. What is more, emphasis is laid on the relative concept of 'truth' and how it is deconstructed in the shaping of this particular version of Shakespeare's story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reflects on the writing of lives and fictions in a South African context in light of the contents of this special issue, and draws parallels with some of the approaches adopted by the contributors. It discusses biography, autobiography, diaries, letters, and testimonies by or about Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela, Eugene Marais, Njube son of Lobengula, Cecil Rhodes, and Olive Schreiner, and problematizes some of the key terms in thinking about postcolonial literatures. In doing so, it explores interconnections between the factual and the fictive in different forms of life writing, the expanded boundaries of biographizing, performances, and transformations of the self, the use of fictions to tell truths, issues with representation and referentiality, the appeal of a return to "the facts" in some circumstances, the position of readers, and how the relationship between "then" and "now" informs writing practices. The conclusion draws on Olive Schreiner's literary credo to propose that an alliance between writers and readers should be part of reconfiguring the biographical impulse in postcolonial literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biographical novels about historical women artists have been experiencing a veritable boom in recent years. Written mostly by women, they can be understood as women authors’ attempts to reach out across time (and often, space) to other “artistic” women whose lives “speak to us” today. It has long been a key insight of historical fiction research that a historical novel reveals more about the time in which it was written than the time in which it is set. As such, it can be assumed that contemporary novels about historical women speak as much to twenty-first-century conceptions of femininity as to particular historical moments of female subjectivity. This paper will compare two novels about historical women artists: Janice Galloway’sClara(2002) about nineteenth-century German pianist Clara Wieck-Schumann and Priya Parmar’sExit the Actress(2011) about Restoration actress Nell Gwyn. While based on historical facts, both these novels use the greater freedom of fiction to depart from biographical conventions. It will be demonstrated that although they resemble each other on the discourse level, employing shifts in the narrative perspective, conspicuous typography, and graphic elements, they differ markedly in the biographical and fictional subgenres in which they participate and, hence, in their gender politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]