William H. Epstein

Stanley Fish opens the collection with a persuasive argument for the role of intention and biography. Michael McKeon, Gordon Turnbull, and Jerome Christensen are concerned with the late eighteenth--and early nineteenth-century English cultural discourse that gave rise to the nearly simultaneous emergence of literary biography, Romantic sensibility, and reflexive human consciousness. The essays by Alison Booth, Cheryl Walker, and Sharon O'Brien reveal that the recognition or lack thereof the biographical subject has received and remains both a problem and an opportunity for women writers and readers. The essays by Valerie Ross, Rob Wilson, Steven Weiland, and William Epstein pursue the question of difference and cultural reification in the theory and practice of a specifically American biography and biographical criticism.

Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism

Contesting the Subject

R. Barton Palmer

How Hollywood biopics both showcase and modify various notions of what it means to be an American. Biopics—films that chronicle the lives of famous and notorious figures from our national history—have long been one of Hollywood’s most popular and important genres, offering viewers various understandings of American national identity. Invented Lives, Imagined Communities provides the first full-length examination of US biopics, focusing on key releases in American cinema while treating recent developments in three fields: cinema studies, particularly the history of Hollywood; national identity studies dealing with the American experience; and scholarship devoted to modernity and postmodernity. Films discussed include Houdini, Patton, The Great White Hope, Bound for Glory, Ed Wood, Basquiat, Pollock, Sylvia, Kinsey, Fur, Milk, J. Edgar, and Lincoln, and the book pays special attention to the crucial generic plot along which biopics traverse and showcase American lives, even as they modify the various notions of the national character. “A provocative, critically astute study, this collection examines the biopic as a reflexive, refractive modernist film genre. Admirably researched essays provide close, compelling readings of chosen films, while exploring the multilayered matrices of historical fact, biographical and autobiographical literature, popular media representations, and cultural histories—shaping not only the lives and narratives of the performers, artists, and political/historical figures represented but also the practices of the filmmakers as they worked within or on the margins of the Hollywood industry.” — Cynthia Lucia, Rider University “The volume’s greatest strengths include its range, its variety of ideas on the significance of the biopic, and its research—definitive in several cases—into the relation between historical figures and their cinematic counterparts.” — James Morrison, author of Passport to Hollywood: Hollywood Films, European Directors

William H. Epstein

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