Overview

The Routledge Companion to Biofiction provides readers with the history, origins, and evolution of this popular genre. Featuring contributions from leading scholars in the field, this authoritative collection foregrounds analyses of biofiction's core foundations through contemporary debates. The volume is organized into seven sections: Histories of biofiction; Theoretical reflections on biofiction; Biofiction, national models and (trans)national constructions; Biofiction as political intervention; Biofictional case studies; Activating lives: early modern women; and Authorial reflections. This groundbreaking collection features works that refine our understanding of the genesis and evolution of biofiction; theorize its unique and distinctive modes of signifying; reflect on its value for the future and social justice; chart new approaches for doing biofictional analysis; and offer insights from authors of biofiction into the creative process. This is the first collection to bring together the two main schools of interpreting biofiction – the Francophone and Anglophone – while also shedding light on biofictions in many languages, from or about many continents, and offering a platform to established and new voices alike. It will be essential reading for students as well as advanced scholars interested in biographical fiction.

Full Product Details

Author:   Lucia Boldrini ,  Laura Cernat ,  Alexandre Gefen ,  Michael Lackey (University of Minnesota - Morris, MN, USA)
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
ISBN:  

9781032526188

ISBN 10:   1032526181
Pages:   570
Publication Date:   22 June 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

1. Introduction: negotiating biofiction’s territories Part I: Histories of Biofiction 2. Before biofiction: writing Bioi in ancient Greece and Rome 3. The concurrent rise of psychology and biofiction 4. Biofiction and ideologies: Columbiads of the eighteenth century Part II: Theoretical reflections on biofiction 5. Person as character 6. Exofiction: a genre between mediatic and literary practices 7. The writer’s life: from biography to biofiction 8. Counterfactual biofictions: writing against history 9. Death and dying in biofiction 10. Biofiction as an art of the possible 11. Witness to the unattestable Part III: Biofiction, national models and (trans)national constructions 12. Italian biofiction 13. French biofiction in the twenty-first century 14. Transnationalism and artist biofictions 15. Prominence on stage: interrogating the reality of the self Part IV: Biofiction as political intervention 16. Biofiction’s biofabulative edges 17. Perspectivization in postcolonial biofiction: aesthetics, ethics, and politics of multifocal narrative 18. The cultural work of Colonial wives in recent Australian biofictions Part V: Biofictional case studies 19. Haunted by Woolfs: ghosts in new Bloomsbury Group biofiction 20. Virginia Woolf’s Poetics of “New Biography” and the Ethics of Woolf-centric Biofiction 21. Biofiction and sport 22. Confronting evil through literature: Bolaño, Pron, and fictional biography’s border with biofiction 23. The Jesus biofiction in the twenty-first century Part VI: Activating lives: early modern women 24. Women artists and agency in biographical fiction 25. 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 Portrait 27. Women and Shakespeare biofiction Part VII: Authorial reflections 28. What happens to the body is real – Anne Enright, interviewed by Laura Cernat 29. From Small Lives to Biofiction – Pierre Michon, interviewed by Alexandre Gefen 30. “Strange labyrinth”: cultural politics in biofiction about early modern women authors 31. Finding the angle, finding the truth 32. The novel is a fantastic playground – Koen Peeters, interviewed by Laura Cernat Index

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Author Information

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).

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