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, 2016).

• 1. Introduction: negotiating biofiction’s territoriesPart I: Histories of Biofiction 2. Before biofiction: writing Bioi in ancient Greece and Rome3. The concurrent rise of psychology and biofiction4. Biofiction and ideologies: Columbiads of the eighteenth centuryPart II: Theoretical reflections on biofiction5. Person as character6. Exofiction: a genre between mediatic and literary practices7. The writer’s life: from biography to biofiction8. Counterfactual biofictions: writing against history9. Death and dying in biofiction10. Biofiction as an art of the possible11. Witness to the unattestablePart III: Biofiction, national models and (trans)national constructions12. Italian biofiction13. French biofiction in the twenty-first century 14. Transnationalism and artist biofictions15. Prominence on stage: interrogating the reality of the selfPart IV: Biofiction as political intervention16. Biofiction’s biofabulative edges17. Perspectivization in postcolonial biofiction: aesthetics, ethics, and politics of multifocal narrative18. The cultural work of Colonial wives in recent Australian biofictionsPart V: Biofictional case studies19. Haunted by Woolfs: ghosts in new Bloomsbury Group biofiction20. Virginia Woolf’s Poetics of “New Biography” and the Ethics of Woolf-centric Biofiction21. Biofiction and sport22. Confronting evil through literature: Bolaño, Pron, and fictional biography’s border with biofiction23. The Jesus biofiction in the twenty-first centuryPart VI: Activating lives: early modern women 24. Women artists and agency in biographical fiction25. 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 Portrait27. Women and Shakespeare biofictionPart VII: Authorial reflections28. What happens to the body is real – Anne Enright, interviewed by Laura Cernat29. From Small Lives to Biofiction – Pierre Michon, interviewed by Alexandre Gefen30. “Strange labyrinth”: cultural politics in biofiction about early modern women authors31. Finding the angle, finding the truth32. The novel is a fantastic playground – Koen Peeters, interviewed by Laura CernatIndex