Julia Novak

Caitríona Ní Dhúill

This volume addresses the current boom in biographical fictions across the globe, examining the ways in which gendered lives of the past become re-imagined as gendered narratives in fiction. Building on this research, this book is the first to address questions of gender in a sustained and systematic manner that is also sensitive to cultural and historical differences in both raw material and fictional reworking. It develops a critical lens through which to approach biofictions as ‘fictions of gender’, drawing on theories of biofiction and historical fiction, life-writing studies, feminist criticism, queer feminist readings, postcolonial studies, feminist art history, and trans studies. Attentive to various approaches to fictionalisation that reclaim, appropriate or re-invent their ‘raw material’, the volume assesses the critical, revisionist and deconstructive potential of biographical fictions while acknowledging the effects of cliché, gender norms and established narratives in many of the texts under investigation. The introduction of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction

Given the increasing popularity of literary festivals, open mics, and poetry slams, one could justifiably claim that the English-speaking world is currently experiencing a ‘Live Poetry’ boom. Yet, despite this raised awareness for the aesthetic and social potential of performed poetry, academia has barely responded, failing in the process to update and adapt its concept of poetry to meet these recent developments. Bridging this critical gap, this volume provides for the first time a full methodological ‘toolkit’ for the analysis of live poetry by drawing together approaches from diverse disciplines concerned with speech and forms of cultural performance. Most notably, these include literary studies, paralinguistics, musicology, kinesics, theatre and performance studies, and folklore studies. This innovative methodology is demonstrated through sample analyses based on a mixed corpus of audio and video recordings of poetry performances, as well as on personal interviews with practitioners of live poetry. Of value to the scholar and poetry enthusiast alike, this volume presents an indispensable guide for anyone interested in understanding and analysing poetry’s evolution through its current ‘spoken word’ renaissance.

An Integrated Approach to Poetry in Performance

Live Poetry

Lucia Boldrini

This volume examines innovative intersections of life-writing and experimental fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries, bringing together scholars and practicing biographers from several disciplines (Modern Languages, English and Comparative Literature, Creative Writing). It covers a broad range of biographical, autobiographical, and hybrid practices in a variety of national literatures, among them many recent works: texts that test the ground between fact and fiction, that are marked by impressionist, self-reflexive and intermedial methods, by their recourse to myth, folklore, poetry, or drama as they tell a historical character’s story. Between them, the essays shed light on the broad range of auto/biographical experimentation in modern Europe and will appeal to readers with an interest in the history and politics of form in life-writing: in the ways in which departures from traditional generic paradigms are intricately linked with specific views of subjectivity, with questions of personal, communal, and national identity. The Introduction of this book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

Julia Novak

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