Overview
Senior colonial officer from 1813 to 1859, Inspector General James Barry was a pioneering medical reformer who after his death in 1865 became the object of intense speculation when rumours arose about his sex. This cultural history of Barry’s afterlives in Victorian to contemporary (neo-Victorian) life-writing (‘biographilia’) examines the textual and performative strategies of biography, biofiction and biodrama of the last one and a half centuries. In exploring the varied reconstructions and re-imaginations of the historical personality across time, the book illustrates (not least with its cover image) that the ‘real’ James Barry does not exist, any more than does the ‘faithful’ biographical, biofictional or biodramatic rendering of a life in a generically ‘stable’ and discrete form. What Barry represents and how he is represented invariably pinpoints the imaginative, the speculative and the performative: reflections and refractions in the looking glass of genre. Just as ‘James Miranda Barry’, as a subject of cultural inquiry, comes into being and remains in view in the act of crossing gender, so neo-Victorian life-writing constitutes itself through similar acts of boundary transgression. Transgender thus finds its most typical expression in transgenre.
Full Product Details
Author: Ann Heilmann
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Imprint: Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Edition: Softcover Reprint of the Original 1st 2018 ed.
Dimensions:
Width: 14.80cm
, Height: 2.20cm
, Length: 21.00cm
Weight: 0.557kg
ISBN: 9783030100483
ISBN 10: 3030100480
Pages: 402
Publication Date: 29 December 2018
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
“Neo-/Victorian Biographilia is a brilliant addition to both nineteenth-century studies and transgender studies. Anyone who has puzzled over the gender-bending moments in the Brontës or Wilkie Collins—pick your favorite author—will find Heilmann’s study valuable. It is one of the best guides I have read about Victorian and neo-Victorian gender performance.” (Martha Vicinus, Victorian Studies, Vol. 62(1), 2019)
Neo-/Victorian Biographilia is a brilliant addition to both nineteenth-century studies and transgender studies. Anyone who has puzzled over the gender-bending moments in the Brontes or Wilkie Collins-pick your favorite author-will find Heilmann's study valuable. It is one of the best guides I have read about Victorian and neo-Victorian gender performance. (Martha Vicinus, Victorian Studies, Vol. 62 (1), 2019)
Author Information
Ann Heilmann is Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University, UK. The author of three previous monographs, on New Woman Fiction, New Woman Strategies, and Neo-Victorianism (with Mark Llewellyn), she has co-edited a scholarly edition and essay collection on the Anglo-Irish author George Moore. Further (single and collaborative) work includes four essay collections and four anthology sets on late-Victorian, early twentieth-century and contemporary feminism and women’s writing.
