Overview

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.

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9783031090219

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Reviews

“The volume as a whole is of great value to scholars and students of biofiction as a genre. The majority of essays also work in isolation for those interested in the authors and historical subjects represented. … this volume paves the way for a more inclusive and flexible understanding of biofiction. As it stands, it represents a welcome addition to life-writing scholarship.” (Bethany Layne, European Journal of Life Writing, Vol. 12, 2023) “Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction (2024) makes a fine contribution to the Palgrave Studies in Life Writing series. … This book will prove useful to students, especially postgrads, and academics working in English studies, historical fiction, literary studies, life writing (in particular, biography), and women’s studies. … Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction was a fine text … .” (Gay Lynch, Life Writing, February 19, 2024)

“Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction (2024) makes a fine contribution to the Palgrave Studies in Life Writing series. … This book will prove useful to students, especially postgrads, and academics working in English studies, historical fiction, literary studies, life writing (in particular, biography), and women’s studies. … Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction was a fine text … .” (Gay Lynch, Life Writing, February 19, 2024)

Author Information

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).  

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