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This article presents the cultural transfer of the new biography, which attracted avid interest in interwar Poland. It reconstructs how modernist publishing networks circulated Virginia Woolf’s biofiction and Lytton Strachey’s modernist biographies, using previously unexamined archival correspondence from the UK and Polish archives, along with interwar newspapers and magazines from digital and print repositories in Poland. The article focuses on strategies of cultural transfer as developed by the publishing house Rój that launched Strachey’s books, as well as on diverse cultural mediators who reviewed and popularized Woolf’s and Strachey’s works. The early reception of Woolf’s and Strachey’s biographical experiments is examined in the context of the growth of Central European modernism(s) and interwar changes at the global literary marketplace.

Biofiction, literature inspired by the life of real people and histories, has become a popular genre. Rarely, however, have graphic biographies been considered in connection to this rapidly emerging (academic) field. To work out these connections, I want to analyse Manuela Santoni and Alessandro di Virgilio's 2021 Mary Shelley (a German translation of the original 2020 Italian text), a biofictional graphic novel about the life of Mary Shelley, while also considering other examples of the genre. I suggest that graphic novels that draw on real life people -in this case, celebrated author and one of the major influences on Gothic literature, Mary Shelley- make use of the graphic medium and create a new version of their subject. Shelley's relationship with her mother, early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, is a prominent topic of reflection for artists, as well as her relationship with her troubled husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her most famous creation, Frankenstein's creature. Biofictional graphic novels thus controvert the biographical genre and revision it instead as a way of reconnecting with the author in a visual way for a new audience regardless of their familiarity with Shelley's biography.

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.

Copyright of Hipogrifo: revista de literatura y cultura del siglo de oro is the property of Hipogrifo: revista de literatura y cultura del siglo de oro and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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]

This article focuses on novels that, located on the boundary between biography, autobiography and fiction, between detailed archival historical research and imagination, between the documentary and the speculative, seek to reconstruct the life of an ancestor of the writer-narrator to reflect on the traumas, exploitation, hopes, and desires of generations who, in their diasporas, also helped create their modern nations, or whose story challenges the exclusions on which the concept of the nation has been built. The texts discussed are Melania Mazzucco's Vita, Vona Groarke's Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara, Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed's Timira: Romanzo Meticcio, and Maryse Condé's Victoire, les saveurs et les mots. At their center is the negotiation between the individual truth and the relational story across generations on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the tracing of collective histories such as those of nation, of colonization, of diaspora, of internal and external displacement, of rights and emancipation (the downtrodden, the poor, women, the migrant, the refugees), of the origins of dispossession and the permanence of its effects. At the core of the narratives is also the ghostliness of the erased (from history, from memory, from citizenship), the departed (in the sense of being dead and of having traveled away), and the in-between (generic: between the historical and documentary on the one hand, and the novelistic, the fable, fantasy on the other; geographical: between countries, between places, nationalities, national affiliations; historical: across generations; racial: the mestizo, the mulatto). It is, specifically, the biofictional imagination that enables these diasporic, transnational, transracial accounts to open up the possibility of a different, liberating future, by offering the space to imagine such a future, but also by recognizing, through its explicit acknowledgement of its recourse to fictionality, that it does not aim to construct a new myth to replace historical fact, but that it invites all of us to imagine, and strive to bring into existence, a different reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biofiction, a genre that produces 'literature that names its protagonist after an actual biographical figure' [Lackey, M. 2016. The American Biographical Novel. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 1] presents significant technical, imaginative, and ethical challenges to its writers. This article gives a brief history of the biofiction novel and explores creative methodologies used by biofiction authors. The article then describes a post-graduate attempt at writing the manuscript of a novel about Scottish author, Naomi Mitchison and English explorer, Zita Baker. Employing an autoethnographical approach, I explain how I used a dual-methodology of Colm Tóibín's idea of 'becoming' (2010) as creative practice and Meg Mundell's POET model of literary placemaking (2018) and give examples of how these techniques worked in two ways: the writing of character and place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of a wider trend of remedying the past neglect of historic women, their lives are currently being reimagined by writers and artists. This has led to a proliferation of biopics, biofiction and (popular) biographies dedicated to this task. Crime fiction writers, likewise, have approached secret, hidden lives of forgotten females. This paper examines how recent crime novels have re-created the life of the early-modern writer Aphra Behn (1640–1689), employing typical features of the genre. Aphra Behn has recently received much attention: she is famed as the first female writer to have 'made money by [her] pen' (Woolf), and her prose narrative Oroonoko has become central to the history of the early novel. Still, many of the details of her life have remained hidden, leaving crime writers with fascinating possibilities to explore. Next to analysing selected novels, the article examines the wider possibilities of crime writing as life-writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading Helena Janeczec’s The Girl with the Leica, it becomes clear that fiction, disguise, the pursuit of pseudonyms, the unspoken, the tricks of seeking escape routes are part of the grand theater of the world and are in some cases the world itself; but for the characters in this story, as for Janeczec herself, this is an extremely serious game, just as extremely serious was the game of civic engagement for the photographer Gerda Taro, whose biography Janeczec reconstructs. Reality is the residual element, what remains despite the incessant carousel of disguises to which one must playfully submit. It is only in the epilogue that, in the laborious and at times impervious approach to Gerda’s identity, a short circuit between life and work is generated: this is the point at which the frontiers between fact and fiction – the liminal spaces that Françoise Lavocat has investigated with extraordinary critical acumen – become visible, multiplying the pleasure of narration and granting to fiction that extraterritoriality that is its own and that identifies it as such with respect to what fiction is not.

The book Bela Lugosi by Edgardo Franzosini presents itself as a particularly fruitful text for analyzing the dialectic between reality and fiction, since the writer chooses to tell the story of an actor, Bela Lugosi, who confuses his life with that of the character he plays, Count Dracula. This mirroring game lends itself to investigating the intertwining, as interesting as it is problematic, between true and false. The purpose of this article will be twofold: on the one hand to verify how the book falls into the category of biofiction; on the other, to analyze the multiple forms and declinations that the imaginary element takes on to demonstrate how, for the author, this is an indispensable ingredient for grasping the truth and meaning of a life.

Attaining the status of a recognized genre of fiction via postmodernism with its immanent polyphony and deconstructivist possibilities, biofiction in the last two decades of the 20th century eventually became a neat blend of biographical fact and literary fiction with a hybrid aesthetic which opened new perspectives for both enquiries into and interpretations of this kind of fiction in the 21st century. While biographies are still studied and used as references to historical figures, recent criticism has also considered some of the biographical novels as relevant sources about their fascinating lives. With the unwaning interest in the "star-crossed" lives of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and the enormous amount of critical material about them in the form of numerous biographies, monographs, articles, and films, at least five well-known novels have tried to shed light on their tumultuous relationship and marriage culminating with the intention to start divorce proceedings and Plath's suicide. This paper will explore empathy, endurance, authenticity and readability in two of them - Kate Moses's Wintering (2003) and Susan Schaeffer's Poison (2006) while making a commentary on the ever-elusive symbolic truth about the two poets that both novels attempt to illuminate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rupert Everett's The Happy Prince (2018) is a neo-Victorian biofictional film that depicts Oscar Wilde's final years in exile within the narrative framework of his 1888 children's story of the same name. In the film, Wilde (portrayed by Everett) recounts excerpts from the story both as a narrator and onscreen character, which facilitates narrative time jumps from his deathbed to earlier points in his life, and illuminates different aspects of the author by comparing him to various characters from the fairytale. With a desire to invite viewers to relate to Oscar the man, rather than Wilde the icon, Everett fashions a rendering of the author that is intensely personal and based upon his own connection with this famous figure. This filmic biofiction is thus a curious blend of fiction and reality, literary work and life experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses three latest screen portrayals of Emily Dickinson, namely Terence Davies's biopic A Quiet Passion (2016), Madeleine Olnek's independent biographical comedy Wild Nights with Emily (2018), and Alena Smith's Apple TV+ teen series Dickinson (2019-2021), examining to what extent these texts can be termed neo-Victorian biofictions. The article focuses on the latter two screen products, which are analysed as queer and selfreflexive biofictions, questioning and subverting the dominant cultural image of the poet as a reclusive writer and thinker, and portraying her in an irreverent and often humorous way. Their respective creators both chose to make Dickinson's love affair with her sister-in-law the driving force of the plot, demythologising the poet and claiming her as an icon of queer heritage. In turn, Terence Davies's 2016 biopic is treated as a counterfoil to the other two, by virtue of its startlingly conservative and heteronormative agenda. Furthermore, the article discusses the use of humour as a strategy in queer biofiction, and finally it analyses how Olnek's and Smith's projects deploy romantic comedy tropes in their presentation of the romance between Emily Dickinson and Sue Gilbert. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Middle-grade readers, those aged eight to twelve, encounter lessons in feminism through a range of neo-Victorian mystery novels featuring girl sleuths. This essay shines light on two such series that offer exciting adventure narratives couched within biofiction. Jordan Stratford's Wollstonecraft Detective Agency series (2015-2018) gleefully bends chronological dates to allow a young Mary Godwin (later Shelley) to befriend Ada Byron (later Lovelace); the series' four novels infill the thought-lives of these young writers, depicting them as creators of knowledge even during the period of their juvenilia. Nancy Springer's Enola Holmes series (2006-present) uses life-writing to give voice to a Victorian girl's perspectives on the burdens of living in a patriarchal culture. The girls' cases develop a lineage of great Victorian women figures like Mary Somerville, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Florence Nightingale, women who are introduced within the context of their published work. The article further examines how women characters write in code as a way to communicate knowledge seen as deviant by patriarchal systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reconstructions of the Brontë sisters as exceptional women, worthy of empathy and admiration by twenty-first-century readers, increasingly rely on the entanglements of the sisters' literary ambitions and limiting contemporary gender roles. By relying on visual and topical appeals in the form of graphic novels and detective stories, neo-Victorian adaptations of the Brontës further broaden the dimension of biofiction (and vice versa). As instances of popular literature, Isabel Greenberg's graphic novel Glass Town (2020) and Bella Ellis's (aka Rowan Coleman's) Brontë Sisters Mystery Series (2019-) present creative approaches to and engagements with the Brontës, indicating that for a contemporary readership, interest in the authors as protofeminist characters proves to be just as important as interest in their literary oeuvre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alison Case's Nelly Dean (2016) is in many ways typical of the numerous re-writings of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847). In this contemporary novel, constructed as a monologic epistolary retelling of its famous hypotext, Nelly is given the opportunity to tell Mr. Lockwood her side of the story, as well as to provide new information about her relationships to the other characters, especially Hindley Earnshaw. Moreover, the double interrogation of who exactly Nelly is writing for and why she is writing looms larger and larger as the story develops. This article focuses on the analysis of this self-reflexivity and on the promotion of Nelly Dean from second-hand narrator in Wuthering Heights to writer of her own biography in Case's eponymous novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale: Or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930) is based on flashbacks concerning Edward Driffield, a recently deceased Victorian author, who is partly based on Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Alroy Kear, a fictional representation of Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) and author of a planned account of Driffield's life, insists that everything should not be told in the biography, suggesting that some things may be better left unsaid. In a prefiguration of the self-reflexivity of postmodernism, the narrator, Ashenden - Maugham's own persona - expands on the value of the first-person narrative, raising questions of reliability. Thus, the representation of the three author-characters becomes a means to deconstruct the myth surrounding the figure of the writer. Indeed, the reader is led to question what makes the reputation and worth of an author, as Maugham proposes a critical assessment of the process of idealisation of the Victorian author figure, from the relatively brief temporal distance of some forty years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an initial analysis of the experiments around the short forms of narration carried out in the six issues of the journal «Il semplice» (1995-1997). As statutory and unavoidable dimension of the textuality of a journal, brevitas in this case becomes the real ‘cognitive radical’ from which derives the choice of an endless variety of textual typologies in the journal’s indexes, from practical writings to micro-narratives or transcriptions of the living voice of dead people. The short form is the instrument of a battle waged by Ermanno Cavazzoni, Gianni Celati, Daniele Benati and the other editors of the journal against the omnipresence and conformist omnipotence of the novel, but also the terrain of expression of a common ‘repertorial’ vocation testified to by the Catalogo delle prose secondo la specie at the opening of each issue, which conceals an idea of literature as a mapping of the world. A capillary and eccentric enterprise, necessarily imperfect, and for this reason inexhaustible.

Copyright of Olivar is the property of Universidad Nacional de La Plata and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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.

Copyright of Autobiografia is the property of University of Szczecin Press / Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecinskiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The proliferation of hybrid genres is a notable trend in contemporary French literature. Alongside autofiction, new hybrids are emerging in French literature, modelled on a mixture of fiction and factual genre. One of them is exofiction (“ex” + “fiction”), which implies a narrative about fictitious events from the life of a historical character or an attempt to introduce fiction into someone else’s biography. The neologism, belonging to the writer Philippe Vasset, is rapidly entering scholarly and critical discourse, but no systematic attempt to describe the phenomenon has been made. According to Vasset, exofiction can be defined as any narrative that “blends the reality with the phantasms that accompany its representations” (Ph. Vasset); in other words, exofictitious writing practices form the space of “enactivist literature” in the cognitive sense. Exofiction reveals itself in the search for a connection between inner narrator’s experience and the other subject’s experience — including traumatic — through the language. This article attempts to identify the main features of exofiction, according to the enactivist approach in cognitive science and narratology, and to propose an analysis of the genre characteristics of exofiction by the exаmple of the novels by Pascal Quignard, Jean Echenoz and David Foenkinos.

The author explores the limitations of art based on the potential sources of inspiration for Michel Houellebecq’s The map and the territory. The dialectic of art is questioned upon its links to capitalism, the sustainability of art and the artist when it comes to the confidence of realization of one’s ideas. The map-territory relation creates space for expressing the dynamics between the idea itself, its representation and what it entails when it comes to existing or perceived notions of delineation between the natural order (substance, materialization) and modernity (abstraction, impression). Houellebecq’s character gives precedence to the idea, and as in non-art, its serving as a conduit for natural expression, at the same time sets a limit to human expression, culminating in nature overcoming culture. Suggesting that both nature and (idea) art deriving from it can be brutal in their own ways. The inquiry consists of trying to unearth the identity of an artist and doing so by using biofictional practices to draw a connection with, but not limited to, a conceptual creator, Douglas Huebler. Intersection of the conceptual modes of reality with the reality itself in art is inevitable. With art, the onus is in respecting the two worlds with their separate qualities, bonding the differences without negating nor assimilating them; stretching the limits of creation both in the artist and what constitutes art as a whole. Hence, the border, as John Ruskin would say, lies within the mystery of life and art.

The author explores the limitations of art based on the potential sources of inspiration for Michel Houellebecq's The map and the territory. The dialectic of art is questioned upon its links to capitalism, the sustainability of art and the artist when it comes to the confidence of realization of one's ideas. The map-territory relation creates space for expressing the dynamics between the idea itself, its representation and what it entails when it comes to existing or perceived notions of delineation between the natural order (substance, materialization) and modernity (abstraction, impression). Houellebecq's character gives precedence to the idea, and as in non-art, its serving as a conduit for natural expression, at the same time sets a limit to human expression, culminating in nature overcoming culture. Suggesting that both nature and (idea) art deriving from it can be brutal in their own ways. The inquiry consists of trying to unearth the identity of an artist and doing so by using biofictional practices to draw a connection with, but not limited to, a conceptual creator, Douglas Huebler. Intersection of the conceptual modes of reality with the reality itself in art is inevitable. With art, the onus is in respecting the two worlds with their separate qualities, bonding the differences without negating nor assimilating them; stretching the limits of creation both in the artist and what constitutes art as a whole. Hence, the border, as John Ruskin would say, lies within the mystery of life and art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Unlike biographies, biofictions are generally considered to be works of make-believe. This view has dominated public and critical opinion of these two genres because research has largely focused on biofictions that are published after rich biographical legacies. Supported by interviews and archival documents, this article studies Hong Ying's 2002 biofiction of Julian Bell, 'K: The Art of Love', of Julian Bell, and two other biographies of Bell by Peter Stansky and William Abrahams to show biofiction's power in depicting a historical figure's life with more accuracy than the biographies. Further comparative analyses of the biofiction and the biographies also suggest that major sections in Stansky and Abrahams's revised edition of Bell's biography in 2012 were borrowed from Hong's work. The first to prove a biofiction's capacity for biographical and historical truth, this essay encourages future criticisms of biofiction to consider the strength of factual engagement in biofictions that are published without rich biographical legacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Appendix Vergiliana is a heterogeneous collection of pseudo-Vergilian poems, consisting in part of primary pseudepigrapha, i.e. poems that selfconsciously create the illusion of Vergilian authorship (especially Culex and Catalepton). For centuries, scholarship on these poems has been dominated by the question of authenticity. In the wake of New Criticism, Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) and Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’ (1969), however, classical scholars have grown to understand and appreciate how these poems – regardless of who actually wrote them – produce their ‘Vergil’, supplementing the master poet’s oeuvre, inserting themselves in his poetic biography, and casting him in the role of Homerus Romanus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syrie James’s The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë (2009) is a first-person narrative of the last ten years of the Victorian novelist’s life. It is a neo-Victorian celebrity biofiction, tending to the hagiographic. It draws on various biographies of Brontë, on her letters and on her autobiographical novels. Interestingly, it also evokes Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a novel that Brontë famously disliked. The present article considers Secret Diaries within the parameters of neo-Victorian biofiction; it identifies parallelisms with Austen’s classic; it reassesses the relationship between Brontë and Austen; and, in doing all this, shows that the chronological scope of Neo-Victorianism is broad.

Copyright of Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature is the property of Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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]

Ben Elton's Upstart Crow (2016-18) is a popular BBC sitcom about Shakespeare's early years as a writer, while Elton's All Is True (2018) is a somber biopic about Shakespeare's retirement to his family home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Elton's biofictions place a fictionalized historic Shakespeare in direct contact with female antifans--his wife, daughters, and female friends--to broach the contemporary concern of gender equality. In each of Elton's texts, antifans expose Shakespeare's sexism and investment in the patriarchal status quo. However, despite the depth of the antifans' antipathy, Shakespeare antifandom sometimes emerges as ambivalent. A third text, teen comedy St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009), centers its plot on Shakespeare and his antifans but offers a different spin on both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses Richard Flanagan’s novel Wanting (2008) as a narrative informed by a revisionary and critical attitude to nineteenth-century ideologies, which is common to, and, indeed, stereotypical in much neo-Victorian fiction. Drawing on the biographies of two eminent Victorians: Charles Dickens and Sir John Franklin, Flanagan constructs their fictional counterparts as split between a respectable, public persona and a dark, inner self. While all the Victorian characters are represented as “other” than their public image, the focus in the novel, and in this paper, is on Dickens’s struggle to reconcile social propriety with his personal discontent. Flanagan represents this conflict through Dickens’s response to the allegations that starving survivors of Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition resorted to cannibalism. The zeal with which the Victorian writer refuted such reports reveals his own difficulty in living up to social and moral norms. The paper argues that the main link between the different narrative strands in the novel is the challenge they collectively pose to the distinction between the notions of civilization and savagery.

Copyright of Er(r)go: Teoria, Literatura, Kultura is the property of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Slaskiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In Blood-Dark Track: A Family History (2000), Joseph O’Neill, a journalist and barrister of Irish origins living in the Netherlands, (re)constructs the lives of his two grandfathers, the paternal one, Jim O’Neill, an IRA activist from Ireland, and the maternal one, Joseph Dakad, a businessman from Turkey. The two men shared the traumatic experience of being jailed more or less at the same time (1940s) for no clearly apparent political reasons. The grandson’s search to dispel “the taut silences” that covered their incarcerations is to be read as a detective story, an example of biofiction, or, rather, a personal investigation attempting to close the gap between the different cultures that contributed to create his identity clarifying in the process the concepts of nationalism and nationhood.

This article examines three types of interconnected afterlives that have their roots in George Eliot’s well-known insistence that the diffusion of the work is what mattered, not the identity or personality of the writer who produced that work. It suggests, however, that Marian Evans’s efforts to shape the terms in which she would be remembered were riven with a sense of the precariousness of the potential outcomes for legacy building on the basis of written work or good deeds. Her complicated relationship with the idea of an afterlife is a core preoccupation of her final collection of poetry, The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, Old and New (1878). The poems were originally published in magazines and are not typically read consecutively. Collectively, however, they can be seen to reinforce her understanding that legacy building by abjuring ego is a paradoxical and possibly pointless activity. Two other types of afterlife confirm Evans’s anxieties about remembrance. Obituaries and memorial essays that followed in the days and weeks after her death and twenty-first century biofictional representations of the writer, despite their generic distinctiveness as ‘afterlife’ modes, both present reactionary personalized but partial pictures of the woman behind the work in ways that signal a limited capacity to appreciate the complexity and the conflicted and radical nature of both the woman and her work.

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]

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is one of the most adaptable and adapted novels of all time, spurring countless renditions in film, television, comic books, cartoons, and other products of popular culture. Like a meme, this story adapts itself to changing cultural contexts by replication with mutation. This article examines the adaptive and appropriative features of two recent examples of such renditions in the form of television series, Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) and The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015). It discusses palimpsestic appropriations used in these shows, their depiction of Frankenstein and his Creatures, and above all, the themes and their meanings which these twenty-first-century appropriations of Frankenstein offer.

Since the 19th century, along with the expansion of the capitalist system, we see a growing attention to industrial waste as well as an increasing interest for the refuses of history. The recovery of these fragments, left aside from the official narration, represents the condemnation of a selection system which has often been an instrument of power and oppression. Thanks to the developing awareness of this mechanism, art takes on the task of exhuming and enhancing those waste materials through an archaeological perspective. The chiffonier, characterized by this archaeological vocation, is an emblematic figure of Paris during the Second Empire and a collector of the fragments of history. The main characters of Homer & Langley by Doctorow and Raymond Isidore e la sua cattedrale by Franzosini are contemporary chiffonniers who, through their works, create a monument to the objects of waste, while these biographical fictions rehabilitate the narration of these “wasted lives” dominated by mental alienation

Calata nell’episteme postmoderna, ma sempre un po' restia ad abbracciare pienamente la tendenza stilistica del postmodernismo, Marta Morazzoni si è ritagliata una scrittura che evita forme di ostentata metanarrazione, pur lasciando cadere degli accenti sull’attività di costruzione del testo. Allo stesso tempo riprende anche motivi e strategie della prosa dei modernisti, e in particolare la ricerca di una forte dimensione psicologica del narrato con una preferenza quindi per un discorso basato sulla rifl essione piuttosto che sull'azione.

Après quelques remarques sur l’écriture devillienne depuis Pura Vida, nous analyserons la relation entre fiction et faction et le paradoxe du roman sans fiction ou l’exofiction devillienne. Dans ce contexte, nous parlerons du je narratif et des autres, c’est-à-dire des enjeux entre (auto)biographie et (auto)biofiction. Puis nous développerons l’idée comment, chez Deville, Histoire(s) et bio(géo)graphies sont une stratégie d‘écrire contre le fil du temps et l’oubli. Avant d’aborder la question du traitement littéraire des femmes, nous proposerons de comprendre l’œuvre devillienne comme rhizome qui, en fait, n’est rien d’autre que le pari audacieux de Deville de créer une Encyclopédie littéraire. Suite à cette première partie, nous jetterons un regard sur le traitement narratif des figures féminines dans les romans de Deville qui sont tous dominés par des hommes. Il nous intéressera alors d’analyser les rôles que les femmes jouent dans ces romans et d’étudier s’il y a des différences entre les romans Minuit et des romans Seuil. Nous continuerons avec une analyse des manières de caractériser des femmes qui semblent la plupart du temps rester des êtres unidimensionnels, réduites à leurs apparences physiques. Puis nous nous intéresserons au statut ontologique de la Grande Infante (de Castille), personne énigmatique, qui hante le narrateur et apparaît dans plusieurs romans. Finalement, nous nous occuperons des femmes puissantes de l’Amérique centrale qui semblent jouer un rôle décisif pour le destin de plusieurs personnages masculins focalisés dans les romans biofictionnels.

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