Experiments in Life-Writing Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction

This volume examines innovative intersections of life-writing and experimental fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries, bringing together scholars and practicing biographers from several disciplines (Modern Languages, English and Comparative Literature, Creative Writing). It covers a broad range of biographical, autobiographical, and hybrid practices in a variety of national literatures, among them many recent works: texts that test the ground between fact and fiction, that are marked by impressionist, self-reflexive and intermedial methods, by their recourse to myth, folklore, poetry, or drama as they tell a historical character’s story.

Between them, the essays shed light on the broad range of auto/biographical experimentation in modern Europe and will appeal to readers with an interest in the history and politics of form in life-writing: in the ways in which departures from traditional generic paradigms are intricately linked with specific views of subjectivity, with questions of personal, communal, and national identity.

The Introduction of this book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

Introduction; Lucia Boldrini and Julia Lajta-Novak.- 1. Ford Madox Ford and Modernist Experiments in Biography; Max Saunders.- 2. Beckettian Tone versus Narrated Memory in B.S. Johnson’s Trawl; Andy Wimbush.- 3. Journeys of Discovery in Jackie Kay’s Red Dust Road; Pietra Palazzolo.- 4. Jordi Soler’s La Guerra Perdida and the Biographical Experiment; Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir.- 5. Lalla Romano’s Romanzo Di Figure; Antonio Lunardi.- 6. Biography, Fiction and Cross-Dimensional Play in Javier Marías’s Dark Back of Time; María Alhambra Díaz.- 7. Real Life Fiction, Historical Form; Vanessa Hannesschläger.- 8. Experimental Political Biography in the Soviet Union, 1968-1991; Polly Jones.- 9. Writing the Life of Danilo Kiš; Mark Thompson.- 10. Writing the Life of Elizabeth Cary; Ursula Hurley.- 11. Eisegesis, Exegesis, and the Tale of Two Failed Biographies; Will Slocombe.- 12. Interview with Janice Galloway; Janice Galloway, Julia Lajta-Novak.

Lucia Boldrini is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. She is the author of Autobiographies of Others (2012), Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations (2001) and Biografie fittizie e personaggi storici (1998).

Julia Novak is a Marie Andessner Research Fellow at King’s College London, UK and the University of Salzburg, Austria, working on a project on biographical novels about historical women artists. She has written a book on reading groups, Gemeinsam Lesen (2007), and a book on Live Poetry (2011).