Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction (Palgrave Studies in Life Writing) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3319554131 ISBN 13: 9783319554136

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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).

From the Back Cover

Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction probes the wealth and diversity of literary forms that fuse auto/biography and fiction in ingenious ways and interact with other artistic media. The international scholars and practitioners who have contributed to this unique volume engage with daring experiments in the dynamic genre of life-writing and enrich current debates in a flourishing field of study.
-Monica Latham, Professor of British Literature, Université de Lorraine, France

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3319554131
• ISBN 13: 9783319554136
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 311
• Editor: Boldrini Lucia, Novak Julia