Michael Lackey

The Light shines the brightest when the world is at its darkest.

The Bad Seed (Battle for the Heavens, #1)

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.

A Reader

Biographical Fiction

Lucia Boldrini

Alexandre Gefen

Laura Cernat

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.

The Routledge Companion to Biofiction

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 Tóibín, 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.

Biofictional Histories, Mutations and Forms

In the late sixties and early seventies, black separatist movements were sweeping across the United States. This was the era of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael's and Charles Hamilton's Black Power, and Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice. In 1969 a group of distinguished African American intellectuals met at Haverford College in order to devise strategies to dissuade young blacks from adopting a separatist political agenda. The participants included some of the most prominent figures of the civil rights era--Ralph Ellison, John Hope Franklin, and J. Saunders Redding, to name only a notable few. Although these discussions were recorded, transcribed, and edited, they were never published because the funding for them was withdrawn. This volume at last makes the historic Haverford discussions available, rescuing for the modern reader some of the most eloquent voices in the intellectual history of black America. Michael Lackey has edited and annotated the transcript of this lively exchange, and Alfred E. Prettyman has supplied an afterword. While acknowledging the importance of the black power and separatist movements, Lackey’s introduction also sheds light on the insights offered by critics of those movements. Despite the frequent characterization of the dissenting integrationists as Uncle Toms or establishment intellectuals, a misrepresentation that has marginalized them in the intervening decades, Lackey argues that they had their own compelling vision for black empowerment and sociopolitical integration.

A Black Integrationist Manifesto for Racial Justice

The Haverford Discussions

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 Tóibín, 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.

Truthful Fictions across the Globe

Conversations with Biographical Novelists

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.

Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists

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 Tóibín, 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.

An Introduction

Biofiction

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.

The American Biographical Novel

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.

Conversations with Joanna Scott

Interviews with some of the world’s most famous biographical novelists that provide new insights into how novelists from China to Morroco to Canada to South Africa deal with the moving boundaries that separate truth, history, and fiction.

Truthful Fictions Across the Globe

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.

Conversations with Jay Parini

Peter Robinson

Michael Lück

Stephen L. J. Smith

Tourism is becoming an increasingly important component of the global economy, and is subsequently a growing area of university study and research around the world. This unique new textbook covers all aspects of tourism from a contemporary perspective. It includes a range of theoretical and research-based topics supported by examples, case studies and comment boxes from industry representatives. The book is written to complement current teaching practices around the world, offering full coverage of all aspects of tourism management. These include infrastructure management, economic development, types of tourism, marketing, destination management and the pure theory aspects of tourism as seen through sociology and tourist behavior. As tourism is often studied alongside events, hospitality and leisure, these subjects are also included and used to draw together the major themes within tourism.

Michael Lackey

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