On the Periphery of History: Marginal Lives in Contemporary Biofiction.

Literary interest in historical figures has been a common phenomenon since antiquity, so much so that the connection between literature and biography –as a branch of history– has always proven to be a vexed question in that one cannot oftentimes tell the two genres apart: history informs fiction and, in turn, fiction enriches, revises, alters, manipulates, or challenges history. Over the last few decades, this same question –still vexed and stimulating– has engaged and even haunted authors, critics, and general readers alike. Many recent studies have reconsidered and discussed the theoretical, ethical, and philosophical implications of how fiction intrudes into the domains of history and biography under the banner of biofiction, a highly productive neologism that has become the primary object of inquiry in Edel Semple and Ronan Hatfull’s Shakespearean Biofiction on the Contemporary Stage and Screen (2023), Virginia Newhall Rademacher’s Derivative Lives (2022), Caitríona Ní Dhúill and Julia Novak’s Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction (2022), Michael Lackey’s Biofiction: An Introduction (2021), Monica Latham’s Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives (2021), Christian Gutleben and Marie-Luise Kohlke’s Neo-Victorian Biofiction (2020), Nora Goldschmidt’s Afterlives of the Roman Poets (2019), or Ann Heilmann’s Neo-/Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry (2018)  –to name but a few amongst the latest volumes on the subject. 

The International Conference On the Periphery of History: Marginal Lives in Contemporary Biofiction welcomes researchers interested in contemporary rewritings of past lives and invites them to address the previous topics –or similar ones– in 20-minute paper presentations.