Neo-victorian biofiction : reimagining nineteenth-century historical subjects / edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben.

Includes index.

"This 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 expos�e, 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"-- Provided by publisher.

Online resource; title from PDF title page (viewed October 22, 2020).

Intro -- Copyright -- Contents -- Contributors -- Taking Biofictional Liberties: Tactical Games and Gambits with Nineteenth-Century Lives -- 1 Reimagining Actual Lives -- 2 The Nineteenth Century's Prominence in Biofiction -- 3 Biofiction, Biography and Historical Fiction -- 4 The Pursuit of Intimacy Re-Voicing the Dead -- 5 Biofictional Empathy Versus Exposure -- 6 Biofictional Hermeneutics of Suspicion -- 7 Epistemological Disruption and Postmodern Truths -- 8 Neo-Victorian Biofiction's Dilemma with Ethics -- 9 Coda Hindsight or Foresight? -- Part 1: Truths and Post-Truths

Chapter 1 ""Who in the world am I?"": Truth, Identity and Desire in Biofictional Representations of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell -- 1 Unreliable Memories, Uncanny Selves -- 2 Reading/Reviving the Author -- 3 Reading Desire -- 4 Conclusion Biofictional Ethics -- Chapter 2 Fakery and Historical Figures in the Flashman Papers -- 1 Biofiction and Historiographic Metafiction -- 2 Honesty and Authenticity Abraham Lincoln -- 3 Hypocrisy The Seventh Earl of Cardigan -- 4 Sex and Feminism The Rani of Jhansi -- 5 Conclusion Balancing Biofiction and History

Chapter 3 Biofictional Author Figures and Post-authentic Truths -- 1 Biographilia, Biofictions, and a Culture of Rewrite -- 2 Biofictions Literary Lives and Cultural Memory -- 3 The Post-authentic An Encompassing Perspective -- 4 Realism and Historical Consciousness -- 5 Author Novels and Biofictions -- 6 Authorial Mise en Abyme in Neo-Victorian Biofictions -- 7 A Case Study Julian Barnes' Arthur & George -- 8 Biofictional Endings -- Chapter 4 The Silence and the Roar: Resonant Encounters with George Eliot -- 1 Under Scrutiny -- 2 Enduring Love Feminist Mystique and Critique

3 Encountering Eliot through Middlemarch -- 4 Partial Truths and ""The Least Partial Good -- 5 Conclusion The Problem with Consuming Others' Lives -- Part 2: Forms of Otherness and (Re- )Othering -- Chapter 5 Us and Them? Joseph Merrick in Neo-Victorian Children's Fiction -- 1 Constructing the Other The Neo-victorian Freak Show -- 2 How the Elephant Became Merrick, Narrative and Genre -- 3 Telling Tales of 'Us' and 'Them' Vicary and Drimmer -- 4 One of Us? Michael Howell and Peter Ford -- 5 Conclusion Whose Story Is It, Anyway? -- Acknowledgement

Chapter 6 The Vivisectionist's Tale: Auto/Biographical Voice and the Queer Fictions of Empire in Ann Harries's Manly Pursuits -- 1 Life Writing and Biofiction as Vivisection -- 2 Shameful and Shameless Exposure -- 3 Betraying Confidences The Father Confessor -- 4 Queering the (Less Than) Eminent Victorian -- Chapter 7 Biofiction and Diff�erance: Tracing Threads of (Neo-) Victorian Women Travellers in the Amelia Peabody Emerson Series -- 1 The Amelias Weaving a Derridean Web -- 2 Peters's Femininised Egyptology -- 3 Travel Writing and Neo-Victorian Biofiction

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