The Routledge Companion to Biofiction

Lucia Boldrini is Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK and Honorary Professor of Comparative Literature at University College London. She has published on comparative and world literature, biofiction, and modernism and the Middle Ages. Her books include Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (Routledge, 2012). Laura Cernat (she/they) is a FWO postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven, Belgium, who has published on biofiction, autofiction and autotheory, cultural memory, Virginia Woolf, and Lucia Joyce, and organized the 2021 conference Biofiction as World Literature. Alexandre Gefen is "Directeur de Recherche" (Full Research Professor) at the CNRS Theory and History of Modern Art and Literature Laboratory at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, France. He is the author of numerous articles and essays on culture, contemporary literature, and literary theory. Michael Lackey is Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota, USA, where he teaches courses about twentieth- and twenty-first-century intellectual, political, and literary history. His publications include Biofiction: An Introduction (Routledge, 2021) and Biofictional Histories, Mutations, and Forms (Routledge, 2017).

1. Introduction: negotiating biofiction’s territories

Part I: Histories of Biofiction

2. Before biofiction: writing Bioi in ancient Greece and Rome

3. The concurrent rise of psychology and biofiction

4. Biofiction and ideologies: Columbiads of the eighteenth century

Part II: Theoretical reflections on biofiction

5. Person as character

6. Exofiction: a genre between mediatic and literary practices

7. The writer’s life: from biography to biofiction

8. Counterfactual biofictions: writing against history

9. Death and dying in biofiction

10. Biofiction as an art of the possible

11. Witness to the unattestable

Part III: Biofiction, national models and (trans)national constructions

12. Italian biofiction

13. French biofiction in the twenty-first century

14. Transnationalism and artist biofictions

15. Prominence on stage: interrogating the reality of the self

Part IV: Biofiction as political intervention

16. Biofiction’s biofabulative edges

17. Perspectivization in postcolonial biofiction: aesthetics, ethics, and politics of multifocal narrative

18. The cultural work of Colonial wives in recent Australian biofictions

Part V: Biofictional case studies

19. Haunted by Woolfs: ghosts in new Bloomsbury Group biofiction

20. Virginia Woolf’s Poetics of “New Biography” and the Ethics of Woolf-centric Biofiction

21. Biofiction and sport

22. Confronting evil through literature: Bolaño, Pron, and fictional biography’s border with biofiction

23. The Jesus biofiction in the twenty-first century

Part VI: Activating lives: early modern women

24. Women artists and agency in biographical fiction

25. Beyond the cage of facts: liberating the subject in Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020) and The Marriage Portrait (2022)

26. Biofiction’s overlays and hidden underpaintings in Lauren Groff's Matrix and Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait

27. Women and Shakespeare biofiction

Part VII: Authorial reflections

28. What happens to the body is real – Anne Enright, interviewed by Laura Cernat

29. From Small Lives to Biofiction – Pierre Michon, interviewed by Alexandre Gefen

30. “Strange labyrinth”: cultural politics in biofiction about early modern women authors

31. Finding the angle, finding the truth

32. The novel is a fantastic playground – Koen Peeters, interviewed by Laura Cernat

Index