Description
Book SynopsisThis volume explores the many paradoxes of neo-Victorian biofiction, a genre that yokes together the real and the imaginary, biography and fiction, and generates oxymoronic combinations like creative facts, fictional truth, or poetic truthfulness. Contemporary biofictions recreating nineteenth-century lives demonstrate the crucial but always ethically ambiguous revision and supplementation of the historical archive. Due to the tension between ethical empathy and consumerist voyeurism, between traumatic testimony and exploitative exposé, the epistemological response is per force one of hermeneutic suspicion and iconoclasm. In the final account, this volume highlights neo-Victorianism’s deconstruction of master-narratives and the consequent democratic rehabilitation of over-looked microhistories.
Table of Contents Contributors Taking Biofictional Liberties: Tactical Games and Gambits with Nineteenth-century Lives Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben Part 1: Truths and Post-Truths 1 “Who in the world am I?”: Truth, Identity and Desire in Biofictional Representations of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell Charlotte Boyce 2 Fakery and Historical Figures in the Flashman Papers Matthew Crofts 3 Biofictional Author Figures and Post-authentic Truths Roberta Gefter Wondrich 4 The Silence and the Roar: Resonant Encounters with George Eliot Laura Savu Walker Part 2: Forms of Otherness and (Re-)Othering 5 Us and Them? Joseph Merrick in Neo-Victorian Children’s Fiction Helen Davies 6 The Vivisectionist’s Tale: Auto/Biographical Voice and the Queer Fictions of Empire in Ann Harries’s Manly Pursuits Jeanne Ellis 7 Biofiction and Différance: Tracing Threads of (Neo-) Victorian Women Travellers in the Amelia Peabody Emerson Series Stacey L.Kikendall 8 Biofiction Goes Global: Richard Flanagan’s Wanting, Dickens, and the Lost Child Catherine Lanone Part 3: After-Lives of Fame and Infamy 9 Polymath Revisited: Cross-lighting R.F. Burton between Cultural Passing and Steampunk Action Sylvia Mieszkowski 10 (Re)Tracing Charlotte Brontë’s Steps: Biofiction as Memory Text in Michèle Roberts’sThe Mistressclass Sonia Villegas-López 11 Julia Margaret Cameron and Archival Imagination: Materiality and Subjectivity in Biofictions of a Victorian Photographer Lucy Smith 12 Musical Madness: Biofictional Performances of the Lizzie Borden Murders Marc Napolitano Index
