Derivative Lives

Virginia Newhall Rademacher is Professor of Hispanic Literature and Cultural Studies 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.

• AcknowledgementsIntroductionSECTION I The Circumstantial Case: Chasing Criminals/Tracing Traumatic Histories1. Making the Circumstantial Case: Reasonable Doubt and Moral Certainty in Javier Cercas’ Soldiers of Salamis 2. Fugitive Biofictions: Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Like a Fading Shadow and Gabriela Ybarra’s The Dinner GuestSECTION II Speculative Truths and Derivative Fictions3. Entertaining the What-Ifs in Rosa Montero’s The Madwoman of the House and the Ridiculous Idea of Never Seeing You Again4. Fraudulent Pasts and Fictional Futures in Javier Cercas’ The Impostor and Adolfo García Ortega’s The Birthday Buyer SECTION III Critical Play in Biofictional Games5. Playing for Real: Simulated Games of Identity in Lucía Etxebarria’s Courtney and I and Truth is Nothing but a Moment of FalsehoodAppendices to Chapter 5 6. Literary Afterlives and Paratextual Play: Elvira Navarro’s The Last Days of Adelaida García Morales and Antonio Orejudos’s The Famous Five and MeCoda: Biofiction’s Antidotes to Post-TruthEndnotesBibliographyIndex

Derivative Lives is undoubtedly a very interesting approach to the phenomenon of biofiction in Spain in the last two decades. The reader ignorant of Spanish culture will find fine analyses of well-chosen texts, by canonical authors or not, that dwell on the creation of other lives, other possibilities, personal or not, and that serve to discuss the uses of post-truth, truth, fiction and reality, all concepts that the supposedly moribund postmodernism has put back on the table, in a context different from the one that saw its birth. The book is very well organized, has a generous and accurate use of an abundant bibliography, the notes are numerous and pertinent, in an ambitious work on the diverse possibilities of biofiction.