The project “Contemporary Biofiction: Peripheral Figures and Transnational Crossings” (CIGE/2023/50) sets out to study the representation of peripheral and transnational historical figures in contemporary biofiction, with special emphasis on Anglophone authors and within the period stretching from the 1990s to the present day. Our project is predicated, on the one hand, on the theoretical and analytical foundations that we laid in our previous project (2022-2023) and, on the other, on the growing literary criticism around biofiction.  We pay particular attention to the work of American scholar Michael Lackey, author and/or editor of numerous significant volumes: Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists (2014), The American Biographical Novel (2016), Biographical Fiction: A Reader (2017), Conversations with Biographical Novelists Truthful Fictions across the Globe (2018), Biofictional Histories, Mutations and Forms (2018) and Biofiction: An Introduction (2021). In these and other publications, Lackey has demonstrated that biofiction, understood as the recreation of past lives through the syncretic encounter between historiography and the literary imagination, has become a dominant literary form over the last thirty years and has made it necessary for critics to establish a specialised field of enquiry for the study of how various biographical figures arouse avid interest among contemporary writers and become historical referents of great relevance to our present.

Our research project is grounded on the key hypothesis that we cannot fully understand the current development of biofiction without paying due attention to the roles, functions and discourses attributed to peripheral historical figures that are either foregrounded as genuine protagonists or represented as secondary voices that, despite their minor diegetic importance, become necessary pieces in the reconstruction of those who occupy the centrality of the biofictional narrative.

Our general objective is to analyse the representation of these peripheral figures in contemporary biofiction in the light of different conceptual parameters of a narratological and sociological nature: degree of protagonism, diegetic complexity, interaction with the narrative environment, fidelity to historiographical sources, textual presence of historical materials, gender perspective, social class, geographical origin, ethnicity or sexual identity. 

In the course of our project, we will implement a research methodology articulated around three interrelated approaches: (1) the theoretical foundations established in our first project, (2) the most recent contributions to the concept of microhistory, and (3) the different ways of applying the paradigm of transnationalism to literary studies. The results of these applications will take the form of a postgraduate seminar, an international conference, a collection of several paper presentations, and a number of articles or book chapters, all of which will be announced and disseminated on this website.