Derivative Lives: Biofiction, Uncertainty, and Speculative Risk in Contemporary Spanish Narrative

The title of this book, Derivative Lives, alludes to the challenge of finding one’s way within the contemporary market of virtually limitless information and claims to veracity. Amid this profusion of options, it is easy to feel lost in spaces of uncertainty where biographical truth teeters between the real and the imaginative. The title thus also points to the prolific market of biographical novels that openly and intentionally play in the speculative space between the real and the fictional. Drawing on theories of risk and uncertainty, Derivative Lives considers the surge in biofiction in Spain and globally, relating literary expression to concepts such as circumstantiality, derivatives, speculation, and game studies.

Virginia Newhall Rademacher is Professor of Hispanic Literature and Cultural Studies, and Chair of the Arts and Humanities Division at Babson College, USA. She has published widely on genre, identity, and new narrative formats, including the contemporary surge in biofiction. Among others, her publications have appeared in a/b:Auto/Biography Studies, American Book Review, Persona Studies, Economistas, Hispanic Issues, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Ciberletras, and Monographic Review.

Michael Lackey is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English at the University of Minnesota Morris, USA. He is series editor of Bloomsbury's Biofiction Studies series and author or editor of 13 books, including of The Modernist God State: A Literary Study of the Nazis' Christian Reich (Bloomsbury, 2012), Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists (Bloomsbury, 2014), The American Biographical Novel (Bloomsbury, 2016), and Ireland, the Irish, and the Rise of Biofiction (Bloomsbury, 2021). He is also recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar award, and the Obama Institute Fellowship.