Outsider biographies : Savage, de Sade, Wainewright, Ned Kelly, Billy the Kid, Rimbaud and Genet: base crime and high art in biography and bio-fiction, 1744-2000 / Ian H. Magedera.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Magedera, Ian H., author.

Series:

Text (Rodopi (Firm)) ; 75.

Textxet. Studies in Comparative Literature ; 75

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Biography as a literary form.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (352 p.)

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam, Netherlands ; New York : Rodopi, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Concerning itself with biography and bio-fiction written in English and in French and also taking in American and Australian subjects, Outsider Biographies focuses on writers who have a criminal record and on notorious criminals who authors of bio-fiction consider as writers. It pursues an understanding of the formal effects of life-writers’ struggles between championing their subjects and a deep ambivalence towards their subjects’ crimes. The book analyses the challenge that these literary outsiders present to the mainstream French- and English-language traditions where many biographers assign merit to productive lives well lived. The book’s approach illuminates both differences in those traditions from the mid-eighteenth, to the twenty-first century and a convergence between them, evident in the experimental-cum-fictional devices in recent English-language biography. Outsider Biographies advances wide-ranging new interpretations of the biographical writing on each of its seven subjects, but does so in a way that invites the reader picking up the book out of a passion for just one of those subjects, to follow the thread onto another and yet another.

Contents:

Preliminary Material

OUTSIDER BIOGRAPHY: DEFINITIONS AND CORPUS

PARTIAL BIOGRAPHIES BY SAMUEL JOHNSON AND RICHARD HOLMES

DE SADE ACCORDING TO SAINTE-BEUVE, APOLLINAIRE, LELY AND LEVER

BARTHES’ AND PAUVERT’S QUESTIONING OF DE SADE BIOGRAPHY

AN OUTLAW IN FICTIONAL BIOGRAPHY: ANDREW MOTION’S THOMAS GRIFFITHS WAINEWRIGHT 1794-1847

AN OUTLAW IN FICTIONAL BIOGRAPHY: PETER CAREY’S NED KELLY 1855-1880

AN OUTLAW IN FICTIONAL BIOGRAPHY: MICHAEL ONDAATJE’S BILLY THE KID 1859-1881

‘FAMILY BIOGRAPHIES’ OF RIMBAUD, FOLLOWED BY SCEPTICISM AND ANTI-BIOGRAPHY

ARTHUR RIMBAUD: STEINMETZ’S BIOGRAPHY AND MICHON’S BIOGRAPHICAL FICTION

JEAN GENET: BIOGRAPHY AND SAINT GENET

JEAN GENET: BIOGRAPHY AFTER SAINT GENET

THE OUTSIDER’S SOLITUDE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed December 19, 2014).

ISBN:

94-012-1143-4

OCLC:

890589944

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789401211437 DOI