Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure, and it has become a dominant literary form over the last 35 years. What has not yet been scholarly acknowledged or documented is that the Irish played a crucial role in the origins, evolution, rise, and now dominance of biofiction. Michael Lackey first examines the groundbreaking biofictions that Oscar Wilde and George Moore authored in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as the best biographical novels about Wilde (by Peter Ackroyd and Colm Toibin). He then focuses on contemporary authors of biofiction (Sabina Murray, Graham Shelby, Anne Enright, and Mario Vargas Llosa, who Lackey has interviewed for this work) who use the lives of prominent Irish figures (Roger Casement and Eliza Lynch) to explore the challenges of seizing and securing a life-promoting form of agency within a colonial and patriarchal context. In conclusion, Lackey briefly analyzes biographical novels by Peter Carey and Mary Morrissy to illustrate why agency is of central importance for the Irish, and why that focus mandated the rise of the biographical novel, a literary form that mirrors the constructed Irish interior.

How does a writer approach a novel about a real person? In this new collection of interviews, authors such as Emma Donoghue, David Ebershoff, David Lodge, Colum McCann, Colm Toibin, and Olga Tokarczuk sit down with literary scholars to discuss the relationship of history, truth, and fiction. Taken together, these conversations clarify how the biographical novel encourages cross-cultural dialogue, promotes new ways of thinking about history, politics, and social justice, and allows us to journey into the interior world of influential and remarkable people.

In this new collection of interviews, some of America's most prominent novelists identify the key intellectual developments that led to the rise of the contemporary biographical novel, discuss the kind of historical 'truth' this novel communicates, indicate why this narrative form is superior to the traditional historical novel, and reflect on the ideas and characters central to their individual works. These interviews do more than just define an innovative genre of contemporary fiction. They provide a precise way of understanding the complicated relationship and pregnant tensions between contextualized thinking and historical representation, interdisciplinary studies and 'truth' production, and fictional reality and factual constructions. By focusing on classical and contemporary debates regarding the nature of the historical novel, this volume charts the forces that gave birth to a new incarnation of this genre.

"The Modernist God State" seeks to overturn the traditional secularization approach to intellectual and political history and to replace it with a fuller understanding of the religious basis of modernist political movements. Lackey demonstrates that Christianity, instead of fading after the Enlightenment, actually increased its power by becoming embedded within the concept of what was considered the legitimate nation state, thus determining the political agendas of prominent political leaders from King Leopold II to Hitler.
Lackey first argues that novelists can represent intellectual and political history in a way that no other intellectual can. Specifically, they can picture a subconscious ideology, which often conflicts with consciously held systems of belief, short-circuiting straight into political action, an idea articulated by E.M. Forster. Second, in contrast to many literary scholars who discuss Hitler and the Nazis without studying and quoting their texts, Lackey draws his conclusions from close readings of their writings. In doing so, he shows that one cannot understand the Nazis without taking into account the specific version of Christianity underwriting their political agenda.

Before the 1970s, there were only a few acclaimed biographical novels. But starting in the 1980s, there was a veritable explosion of this genre of fiction, leading to the publication of spectacular biographical novels about figures as varied as Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and Marilyn Monroe, just to mention a notable few. This publication frenzy culminated in 1999 when two biographical novels (Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and Cunningham's novel won the award. In The American Biographical Novel, Michael Lackey charts the shifts in intellectual history that made the biographical novel acceptable to the literary establishment and popular with the general reading public. More specifically, Lackey clarifies the origin and evolution of this genre of fiction, specifies the kind of 'truth' it communicates, provides a framework for identifying how this genre uniquely engages the political, and demonstrates how it gives readers new access to history.

Biofiction: An Introduction provides readers with the history, origins, evolution, and legitimization of biofiction, suggesting potential lines of inquiry, exploring criticisms of the literary form, and modeling the process of analyzing and interpreting individual texts. Written for undergraduate and graduate students, this volume combines comprehensive coverage of the core foundations of biofiction with contemporary and lively debates within the subject. The volume aims to confront and illuminate the following questions: * When did biofiction come into being? * What forces gave birth to it? * How does it uniquely function and signify? * Why has it become such a dominant aesthetic form in recent years? This introduction will give readers a framework for evaluating specific biofictions from writers as varied as Friedrich Nietzsche, George Moore, Zora Neale Hurston, William Styron, Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates, and Colm Toibin, thus enabling readers to assess the value and impact of individual works on the culture at large. Spanning nineteenth-century origins to contemporary debates and adaptations, this book not only equips the reader with a firm grounding in the fundamentals of biofiction but also provides a valuable guide to the uncanny power of the biographical novel to transform cultural attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs.

Biofiction, defined as literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure, first became popular in the 1930s, but over the last forty years it has become a dominant literary form. Prominent writers such as J.M. Coetzee, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Julia Alvarez, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel, Colm Toibin, Anne Enright, Colum McCann, and Michael Cunningham have authored spectacular biographical novels which have won some of the world's most prestigious awards for fiction. However, in spite of the prominence of these authors, works, and awards, there has been considerable confusion about the nature of biofiction. This collection of process pieces and academic essays from authors and scholars of biofiction defines the nature of the aesthetic form, clarifies why it has come into being, specifies what it is uniquely capable of signifying, illustrates how it pictures the historical and critiques the political, and suggests potential directions for future studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Biofiction: An Introduction provides readers with the history, origins, evolution, and legitimization of biofiction, suggesting potential lines of inquiry, exploring criticisms of the literary form, and modeling the process of analyzing and interpreting individual texts. Written for undergraduate and graduate students, this volume combines comprehensive coverage of the core foundations of biofiction with contemporary and lively debates within the subject. The volume aims to confront and illuminate the following questions: * When did biofiction come into being? * What forces gave birth to it? * How does it uniquely function and signify? * Why has it become such a dominant aesthetic form in recent years? This introduction will give readers a framework for evaluating specific biofictions from writers as varied as Friedrich Nietzsche, George Moore, Zora Neale Hurston, William Styron, Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates, and Colm Toibin, thus enabling readers to assess the value and impact of individual works on the culture at large. Spanning nineteenth-century origins to contemporary debates and adaptations, this book not only equips the reader with a firm grounding in the fundamentals of biofiction but also provides a valuable guide to the uncanny power of the biographical novel to transform cultural attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs.

Jay Parini (b. 1948), is best known for The Last Station, a novel about Leo Tolstoy's last year has been translated into more than twenty-five languages and made into a Hollywood film. But he has also published numerous volumes of poetry; biographies of William Faulkner, Robert Frost, and John Steinbeck; novels; and literary and cultural criticism. This book contains the most important interviews with the former Guggenheim fellow; a former Fowler Hamilton Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford; and a former fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of London. Parini's work is valuable not just because of its high quality and intellectual range. Parini's life and writings often seem like a seminar table, with friends gathered, talking and trading stories. He has openly written poems in conversation with writers he knew personally: Robert Penn Warren, Gore Vidal, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He has, in his own life, kept an ongoing conversation with many literary friends over the years--Alastair Reid, Seamus Heaney, Anne Stevenson, Ann Beattie, Julia Alvarez, Peter Ackroyd, A. N. Wilson, and countless others. These interviews offer a more comprehensive understanding of Parini's work as a poet, scholar, public intellectual, literary critic, intellectual historian, biographer, novelist, and biographical novelist. More importantly, these interviews will contribute to our understanding of the history of ideas, the condition of knowledge, and the state of literature, all of which Parini has played an important role in shaping. MICHAEL LACKEY, Morris, Minnesota, is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He is the author of African American Atheists and Political Liberation: A Study of the Socio-Cultural Dynamics of Faith and The Modernist God State: A Literary Study of the Nazis' Christian Reich as well as numerous articles in journals.

Joanna Scott (b. 1960) has been one of America's leading writers since the 1990s. Both critically acclaimed and winner of numerous prestigious awards, Scott's unique and probing vision and masterful writing has inspired readers to adjust their perceptions of life and of themselves. Her fiction jolts and illuminates, frequently exposing the degree to which the perverse is natural and the ordinary is twisted and demented. Conversations with Joanna Scott presents eighteen interviews that span two decades and are as much about the process of reading as they are about writing. Witty, probing, wide-ranging, and insightful, Scott's off-the-cuff observations about literature and life are as thought-provoking as some of the most memorable lines and scenes in her fiction. Not only shedding new light on Scott's fiction, Conversations with Joanna Scott also illuminates enduring areas of inquiry, like the challenge of trying to make art out of sentences; the effort to recover and imagine lost stories from the past; the changing status of the literary imagination; fictional portraiture and the productive possibilities that come from blending biography and fiction; and concerns about literacy. Joanna Scott has made her name through brilliant, award-winning novels, but this volume clarifies why she is also one of America's leading public intellectuals and an astute critic of literature and culture.

Biofiction, defined as literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure, first became popular in the 1930s, but over the last forty years it has become a dominant literary form. Prominent writers such as J.M. Coetzee, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Julia Alvarez, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel, Colm Toibin, Anne Enright, Colum McCann, and Michael Cunningham have authored spectacular biographical novels which have won some of the world's most prestigious awards for fiction. However, in spite of the prominence of these authors, works, and awards, there has been considerable confusion about the nature of biofiction. This collection of process pieces and academic essays from authors and scholars of biofiction defines the nature of the aesthetic form, clarifies why it has come into being, specifies what it is uniquely capable of signifying, illustrates how it pictures the historical and critiques the political, and suggests potential directions for future studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

In recent years, the biographical novel has become one of the most dominant literary forms-J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, Colum McCann, Anne Enright, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Carey, Russell Banks, and Julia Alvarez are just a few luminaries who have published stellar biographical novels. But why did this genre come into being mainly in the 20th century? Is it ethical to invent stories about an actual historical figure? What is biofiction uniquely capable of signifying? Why are so many prominent writers now authoring such works? And why are they winning such major awards? In Biographical Fiction: A Reader, some of the finest scholars and writers of biofiction clarify what led to the rise of this genre, reflect on its nature and form, and specify what it is uniquely capable of doing. Combining primary and critical material, this accessible reader will be invaluable to students, teachers, and scholars of biofiction.

Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure, and it has become a dominant literary form over the last 35 years. What has not yet been scholarly acknowledged or documented is that the Irish played a crucial role in the origins, evolution, rise, and now dominance of biofiction. Michael Lackey first examines the groundbreaking biofictions that Oscar Wilde and George Moore authored in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as the best biographical novels about Wilde (by Peter Ackroyd and Colm Tóibín). He then focuses on contemporary authors of biofiction (Sabina Murray, Graham Shelby, Anne Enright, and Mario Vargas Llosa, who Lackey has interviewed for this work) who use the lives of prominent Irish figures (Roger Casement and Eliza Lynch) to explore the challenges of seizing and securing a life-promoting form of agency within a colonial and patriarchal context. In conclusion, Lackey briefly analyzes biographical novels by Peter Carey and Mary Morrissy to illustrate why agency is of central importance for the Irish, and why that focus mandated the rise of the biographical novel, a literary form that mirrors the constructed Irish interior.

Before the 1970s, there were only a few acclaimed biographical novels. But starting in the 1980s, there was a veritable explosion of this genre of fiction, leading to the publication of spectacular biographical novels about figures as varied as Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and Marilyn Monroe, just to mention a notable few. This publication frenzy culminated in 1999 when two biographical novels (Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and Cunningham's novel won the award. In The American Biographical Novel, Michael Lackey charts the shifts in intellectual history that made the biographical novel acceptable to the literary establishment and popular with the general reading public. More specifically, Lackey clarifies the origin and evolution of this genre of fiction, specifies the kind of 'truth' it communicates, provides a framework for identifying how this genre uniquely engages the political, and demonstrates how it gives readers new access to history.

In this new collection of interviews, some of America's most prominent novelists identify the key intellectual developments that led to the rise of the contemporary biographical novel, discuss the kind of historical 'truth' this novel communicates, indicate why this narrative form is superior to the traditional historical novel, and reflect on the ideas and characters central to their individual works. These interviews do more than just define an innovative genre of contemporary fiction. They provide a precise way of understanding the complicated relationship and pregnant tensions between contextualized thinking and historical representation, interdisciplinary studies and 'truth' production, and fictional reality and factual constructions. By focusing on classical and contemporary debates regarding the nature of the historical novel, this volume charts the forces that gave birth to a new incarnation of this genre.

"The Modernist God State" seeks to overturn the traditional secularization approach to intellectual and political history and to replace it with a fuller understanding of the religious basis of modernist political movements. Lackey demonstrates that Christianity, instead of fading after the Enlightenment, actually increased its power by becoming embedded within the concept of what was considered the legitimate nation state, thus determining the political agendas of prominent political leaders from King Leopold II to Hitler.
Lackey first argues that novelists can represent intellectual and political history in a way that no other intellectual can. Specifically, they can picture a subconscious ideology, which often conflicts with consciously held systems of belief, short-circuiting straight into political action, an idea articulated by E.M. Forster. Second, in contrast to many literary scholars who discuss Hitler and the Nazis without studying and quoting their texts, Lackey draws his conclusions from close readings of their writings. In doing so, he shows that one cannot understand the Nazis without taking into account the specific version of Christianity underwriting their political agenda.

Joanna Scott (b. 1960) has been one of America's leading writers since the 1990s. Both critically acclaimed and winner of numerous prestigious awards, Scott's unique and probing vision and masterful writing has inspired readers to adjust their perceptions of life and of themselves. Her fiction jolts and illuminates, frequently exposing the degree to which the perverse is natural and the ordinary is twisted and demented. Conversations with Joanna Scott presents eighteen interviews that span two decades and are as much about the process of reading as they are about writing. Witty, probing, wide-ranging, and insightful, Scott's off-the-cuff observations about literature and life are as thought-provoking as some of the most memorable lines and scenes in her fiction. Not only shedding new light on Scott's fiction, Conversations with Joanna Scott also illuminates enduring areas of inquiry, like the challenge of trying to make art out of sentences; the effort to recover and imagine lost stories from the past; the changing status of the literary imagination; fictional portraiture and the productive possibilities that come from blending biography and fiction; and concerns about literacy. Joanna Scott has made her name through brilliant, award-winning novels, but this volume clarifies why she is also one of America's leading public intellectuals and an astute critic of literature and culture.

How does a writer approach a novel about a real person? In this new collection of interviews, authors such as Emma Donoghue, David Ebershoff, David Lodge, Colum McCann, Colm Toibin, and Olga Tokarczuk sit down with literary scholars to discuss the relationship of history, truth, and fiction. Taken together, these conversations clarify how the biographical novel encourages cross-cultural dialogue, promotes new ways of thinking about history, politics, and social justice, and allows us to journey into the interior world of influential and remarkable people.

Jay Parini (b. 1948) is best known for his novel about Leo Tolstoy's last year, The Last Station, which has been translated into more than twenty-five languages and made into a Hollywood film. But he has also published numerous volumes of poetry; biographies of William Faulkner, Robert Frost, and John Steinbeck; novels; and literary and cultural criticism. This book contains the most important interviews with the former Guggenheim fellow; a former Fowler Hamilton Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford; and a former fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of London. Parini's work is valuable not just because of its high quality and intellectual range. Parini's life and writings often seem like a seminar table, with friends gathered, talking and trading stories. He has openly written poems in conversation with writers he knew personally: Robert Penn Warren, Gore Vidal, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He has, in his own life, kept an ongoing conversation with many literary friends over the years - Alastair Reid, Seamus Heaney, Anne Stevenson, Ann Beattie, Julia Alvarez, Peter Ackroyd, A. N. Wilson, and countless others. These interviews offer a more comprehensive understanding of Parini's work as a poet, scholar, public intellectual, literary critic, intellectual historian, biographer, novelist, and biographical novelist. More importantly, these interviews will contribute to our understanding of the history of ideas, the condition of knowledge, and the state of literature, all of which Parini has played an important role in shaping.

In recent years, the biographical novel has become one of the most dominant literary forms-J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, Colum McCann, Anne Enright, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Carey, Russell Banks, and Julia Alvarez are just a few luminaries who have published stellar biographical novels. But why did this genre come into being mainly in the 20th century? Is it ethical to invent stories about an actual historical figure? What is biofiction uniquely capable of signifying? Why are so many prominent writers now authoring such works? And why are they winning such major awards? In Biographical Fiction: A Reader, some of the finest scholars and writers of biofiction clarify what led to the rise of this genre, reflect on its nature and form, and specify what it is uniquely capable of doing. Combining primary and critical material, this accessible reader will be invaluable to students, teachers, and scholars of biofiction.