Conversations with biographical novelists : truthful fictions across the globe / edited by Michael Lackey.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Lackey, Michael, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Biographical fiction--History and criticism.

Biographical fiction.

Novelists--Interviews.

Novelists.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (295 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Summary:

"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."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

"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 Ti̤bn̕, and Olga Tokarczuk sit down with literary scholars to discuss the relationship of history, truth, and fiction. Taken together, these conversations enable readers to explore how these issues are negotiated in contemporary world literature. 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"--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Contents:

Introduction: the agency aesthetics of biofiction in the age of postmodern confusion / Michael Lackey

Positive contamination in the biographical novel / Kevin Barry, interviewed by Stuart Kane

Reflections on truth, veracity, fictionalization, and falsification / Laurent Binet, interviewed by Monica Latham

Resisting the "Dictatorship of the present" in the biographical novel / Javier Cercas, interviewed by Virginia Rademacher

Sally Hemings' staircase: on biofiction's afterlives / Barbara Chase-Riboud, interviewed by Melanie Masterton Sherazi

Voicing the nobodies in the biographical novel / Emma Donoghue, interviewed by Michael Lackey

The biographical novel as life art / David Ebershoff, interviewed by Michael Lackey

Fictions of women / Hannah Kent, interviewed by Kelly Gardiner

The bionovel as a hybrid genre / David Lodge, interviewed by Bethany Layne

Contested realities in the biographical novel / Colum McCann, interviewed by Michael Lackey

The biographical novelist as cultural diagnostician / Anchee Min, interviewed by Michael Lackey

Speculative subjectivities and the biofictional surge / Rosa Montero, interviewed by Virginia Rademacher

Stitching up the auto/biographical seam / Stephanus Muller, interviewed by Willemien Froneman

Complex psychologies in the biographical novel / Sabina Murray, interviewed by Michael Lackey

The slant truth of the biographical novel / Nuala O'Connor, interviewed by Julie A. Eckerle

Postmodernism and the biographical novel / Susan Sellers, interviewed by Bethany Layne

The anchored imagination of the biographical novel / Colm Tólbín, interviewed by Bethany Layne

I believe in the novel / Olga Tokarczuk, interviewed by Robert Kusek and Wojciech Szymański

Biographical fiction and the creation of possible lives / Chika Unigwe, interviewed by Michael Lackey

List of biofiction authors

List of interviewers.

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 267-270) and index.

ISBN:

9781501341496

1501341499

9781501341472

1501341472

9781501341489

1501341480

OCLC:

1061128900