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.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I.

The Nineteenth Century Origins


The Art of Agential Living

Portraits of Whom?
Figure One

Figure Two

II.

Literature, Cultural Critique, and Political Liberation


Biofiction as Social Critique

The Irish, the Unslave Trade, and the Decolonization of the Mind

The 1930s and the First Surge in Biofiction
III.

Literary Debates


The Assault on Biofiction

The William Styron Controversy

Postmodernism’s Historiographic Metafiction or Biofiction’s "Truth" Proposals?

John Edgar Wideman on the Ethics of Fictionalizing a Life in Biofiction
IV.

The Uncanny Power of Biofiction


Biofiction as Cultural Intervention: The Case of Sally Hemings

The 1990s: The Decade of Biofiction’s Official Legitimization and Dominance

The Transformative Powers of Biofiction for Students: A Case Study of David Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl