- Valentina Vannucci holds a PhD in English and American Literature from the University of Florence. Her main field of ... moreValentina Vannucci holds a PhD in English and American Literature from the University of Florence. Her main field of interest and research is the new genre of biofiction, on whose subject she focused her 2014 monograph for the Firenze University Press, Letture anticanoniche della biofiction, dentro e fuori la metafinzione: Il mondo ‘possibile’ di Mab’s Daughters [Anti-canonical Readings on Biofiction, In and Outside Metafiction: Mab’s Daughters’ “Possible” World].edit
Research Interests:
Biofiction has become a dominant literary form in recent years. But what exactly is it? And how did it come into being? The editor of the American Book Review asked me to guest-edit a special issue about biofiction in order to answer... more
Biofiction has become a dominant literary form in recent years. But what exactly is it? And how did it come into being? The editor of the American Book Review asked me to guest-edit a special issue about biofiction in order to answer these and many other questions. In my introduction, I survey some of the major moments in the evolution of biofiction and I clarify how my contributors to this special issue have expanded our understanding of the literary form.
Research Interests: History, Cultural History, Irish Studies, Spanish Literature, Medieval Literature, and 46 moreModernism (Literature), Irish Literature, Medieval History, Australian Studies, Italian Studies, Nineteenth Century Studies, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, Shakespeare, The Historical Novel, French Revolution, Australia, Italian Literature, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Virginia Woolf, Nineteenth Century British History and Culture, Postmodernism, Irish History, Postmodern Fiction, Georg Lukacs, Modernism, Renaissance literature, Australian History, Oscar Wilde, Katherine Mansfield, British and Irish History, Postmodernism (Literature), Postmodern Literature, Australian Literature, Postmodern Literary Theory and Popular Culture, Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Leo Tolstoy, Postmodern, Georg Lukács, Arthur Rimbaud, William Shakespeare, Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, Biofiction, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf Studies, Roger Casement, Anne Hathaway Shakespeare, Emma Donoghue, and Ludwig Wittgenstein
New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2017 Bloomsbury has published the first anthology of biofiction. What is the nature of biofiction? How is it different from biography and historical fiction? How is it similar? What kind of "truth" does... more
New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2017
Bloomsbury has published the first anthology of biofiction. What is the nature of biofiction? How is it different from biography and historical fiction? How is it similar? What kind of "truth" does biofiction picture? How does it access and represent history and give us new ways of thinking about history? Hoe does it engage the political? This reader, which consists of a wide range of writings, answers these and many other questions.
Bloomsbury has published the first anthology of biofiction. What is the nature of biofiction? How is it different from biography and historical fiction? How is it similar? What kind of "truth" does biofiction picture? How does it access and represent history and give us new ways of thinking about history? Hoe does it engage the political? This reader, which consists of a wide range of writings, answers these and many other questions.
Research Interests:
Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure. To get some better insight into the nature of biofiction, the editor of The American Book Review commissioned me to guest-edit a special issue about... more
Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure. To get some better insight into the nature of biofiction, the editor of The American Book Review commissioned me to guest-edit a special issue about biofiction. This issue contains essays and reviews from some of the most famous scholars and authors of biofiction today. Here is a link to the special issue: http://muse.jhu.edu/issue/38180
Here is a link to the introduction to the issue: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/689189/pdf
Here is a link to the introduction to the issue: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/689189/pdf
Research Interests: French Literature, Spanish Literature, Spanish, Victorian Studies, Australian Studies, and 41 moreItalian Studies, Mexican Studies, Shakespeare, The Historical Novel, Australia, Victorian Literature, Italian Literature, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Postmodernism, Australian Indigenous Studies, Postmodern Fiction, Georg Lukacs, Contemporary American Literature, Contemporary Literature, Italian Renaissance Art, Neo-Victorian Literature, Australian History, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Neo-Victorian fiction, Postmodernism (Literature), Postmodern Literature, Dmitri Shostakovich, Australian Literature, Postmodern Literary Theory and Popular Culture, Mexican Literature, Bloomsbury Group, Contemporary Spanish Literature and Film, Postmodern, Julian Barnes, Georg Lukács, William Shakespeare, Biographical Novel, Death of the author, Neo-Victorian studies, Lytton Strachey, Biofiction, Virginia Woolf Studies, and Lizzie Borden
Abstract in italiano: Lo studio attira l’attenzione sulle molteplici possibilità interpretative delle biofiction, finzioni che assumono come protagoniste una o più figure del passato. Per la loro analisi critica, ad oggi identificata... more
Abstract in italiano:
Lo studio attira l’attenzione sulle molteplici possibilità interpretative delle biofiction, finzioni che assumono come protagoniste una o più figure del passato. Per la loro analisi critica, ad oggi identificata con una disamina ‘sintomatica’ di vari testi finzionali su un dato periodo/personaggio storico, saranno proposte alcune possibili direzioni non-canoniche: un metodo ‘orizzontale’, che riconduce la biofiction alla ‘galassia finzionale’ di un soggetto scrivente (il caso di Michèle Roberts), e un altro ‘verticale’, che esplora una biofiction-modello per decostruire e ricostruire l’intreccio di voci sincroniche e diacroniche del suo singolare modus operandi. Un’intera parte del saggio sarà dunque dedicata a Mab’s Daughters di Judith Chernaik, un caso estremamente interessante di biofiction ‘a mondi possibili’.
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The essay revolves around the multiple possibilities of interpretation of biofiction, fictional narratives with historical characters in the foreground. For their critical analysis, today a ‘symptomatic’ survey of fictional texts on a particular period/character, there will be proposed some possible anti-canonic directions : an horizontal method, which treats biofiction as part of the galaxy of a writing subject (the case of Michèle Roberts),and a vertical, which explores a biofiction as a model to deconstruct and reconstruct its synchronic and diachronic voices. A section of the monograph will be therefore dedicated to Mab’s Daughters by Judith Chernaik, a very interesting case of ‘possible world’ biofiction
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PART (I Percorsi critici verso la biofiction: la pre-storia delle riscritture).
The last seventy years have witnessed a proliferation of fictions with historical figures as main characters, whose biographies are included in the plot of the story. This first part of my work begins with an introduction of the cultural changes in the second half of the XX century that have brought about this diffusion, especially focusing on the modifying concepts of authoriality, originality, intertextuality as effect of linguistic, semiological and philosophical studies (the contribution of Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Michele Foucault are here analyzed). Then, the attention shifts to the reception of the French thought into the United States, meaning, to Hayden White’s ‘decoding’ of Foucault, to New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. It concludes with a survey of feminism, the feminist reader and criticism, the feminist subject in and beyond the sex/gender dichotomy, and the complex interaction between the feminist and the Foucauldian discourses. The interacting ideas of history, power, narration of the contemporary epistemology suggest that feminist rewritings may be able to provide some sort of ‘truth’, finally evoking the last obsessions of the French philosopher: some of these kinds of biofictions might indeed be read as a Greek parrēsia (παρρησία), the citizens’ faculty of expressing their own opinion in a public arena.
PART 2 (Il ‘genere’ letterario delle biofiction)
As I make clear from the title, I attempt here to discern a particular voice of biofiction among the many historiographic metafictions and “fiction biographies” (Naomi Jacob’s definition for non-traditional biographies), in a way that narrows their definition to narrations that, even if affected by hybridism, show recognizable characteristics. With the help offered by previous studies on the subject and the possible world semantics I compare then different biographical rewritings so as to distinguish texts with overt self-reflections from others where artificiality is not so highly stressed; fictions that exploit historical names only to ‘recombine’ them with identities and ideas ‘foreign’ to the original from ‘reconstructions’ where the fictional world is only slightly different with respect to its equivalent of the tradition (it is, paradoxically, this type of ‘semantically full’ rewriting that entails the consultation of history books for its criticism).
This section also investigates the ethical issues involved in the process of narrativization of history and regarding the theoretic description of the subject, both fictional and non-fictional. Afterwards, it examines some books of the French-English author Michèle Roberts, whose writing, one of the most successful artistic developing of the French psychoanalytic feminism of the 70s, is also very recognizable - kind of a“language of the body” entwined with other specific obsessions of the writer like food, sex, Catholic religion and the cultural collision between England and France. It seems to me that, her fictional worlds in the biofictions The Wild Girl, 1984, and Fair Exchange, 1999, The Mistressclass (2003) may be considered as part of the ‘galaxy’ of a writing subject. I call this ‘horizontal method’.
Part III (Quattro soggetti donna nel circolo di Shelley e il brusio dei discorsi sotto al foglio della storia)
This part is entirely dedicated to explore the strategies of Mab’s Daughters: Shelley’s Wives and Lovers: Their Own Story by Judith Chernaik, a case of possible-world biofiction focused on the years 1816-17 of the Shelley circle and narrated from the eccentric prospective of four female subjects: Harriet Westbrook, Percy Shelley’s first wife; Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, caught in her writing of Frankenstein and still unknown by her contemporary; Fanny Godwin, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and Gilbert Imlay; Claire Clairmont, the second-born of Mary Jane Clairmont who was adopted by William Godwin. The large amount of documents consulted as a part of the interpretative process has included private and public writings such as biographies, autobiographies, novels, poems, and, in the case of the character Mary Shelly, also manuscripts of the authentic journals.
The analysis, exploiting the suggestions offered by the intercrossing perspectives of the novel, explores the modulations of the concept of identity in their phases of textual desegregation and reconstruction, emphasizing reflections on ideological stances and personal prejudices in the formation of the biographical and literary canon (I found particularly fascinating the quite overt ‘discourse’ on Mary Shelley as provided by the ‘left criticism’ in K.N. Cameron, D.H. Reiman, eds, Shelley and his Circle: 1773-1882, Harvard UP, Cambridge, MA ), as well as the collision between the concept of uniqueness and reproducibility and the relevance of the mark of ‘gender’ in the politics of language.
I call this method ‘vertical’ because it explores a biofiction deconstructing and reconstructing its synchronic and diachronic voices in the many and sometimes colliding discourses of history.
PART IV ( Postscriptum. Mab’s daughters e le ‘quinte prospettive’. Ricerche aperte)
The Postscriptum reflects upon some specific features of Mab’s daughters, a case of biofiction written by a scholar (kind of a ‘manuscript-rewriting’); and, taking into consideration an other biofiction of the same author (The Daughter, a Novel Based on the Life of Eleanor Marx, a rewriting of the life of the daughter of the ‘father’ of Communism, Karl Marx), suggests that the two methods of interpretation are not, finally, mutually exclusive. Some possible suggestions for further research also provided in this part, such as a symptomatic study on feminist rewritings set in the Romantic Age (Michèle Roberts’ Fair Exchange and Judith Chernaik’s Mab’s Daughters are, in some ways, similar) .
Lo studio attira l’attenzione sulle molteplici possibilità interpretative delle biofiction, finzioni che assumono come protagoniste una o più figure del passato. Per la loro analisi critica, ad oggi identificata con una disamina ‘sintomatica’ di vari testi finzionali su un dato periodo/personaggio storico, saranno proposte alcune possibili direzioni non-canoniche: un metodo ‘orizzontale’, che riconduce la biofiction alla ‘galassia finzionale’ di un soggetto scrivente (il caso di Michèle Roberts), e un altro ‘verticale’, che esplora una biofiction-modello per decostruire e ricostruire l’intreccio di voci sincroniche e diacroniche del suo singolare modus operandi. Un’intera parte del saggio sarà dunque dedicata a Mab’s Daughters di Judith Chernaik, un caso estremamente interessante di biofiction ‘a mondi possibili’.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The essay revolves around the multiple possibilities of interpretation of biofiction, fictional narratives with historical characters in the foreground. For their critical analysis, today a ‘symptomatic’ survey of fictional texts on a particular period/character, there will be proposed some possible anti-canonic directions : an horizontal method, which treats biofiction as part of the galaxy of a writing subject (the case of Michèle Roberts),and a vertical, which explores a biofiction as a model to deconstruct and reconstruct its synchronic and diachronic voices. A section of the monograph will be therefore dedicated to Mab’s Daughters by Judith Chernaik, a very interesting case of ‘possible world’ biofiction
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART (I Percorsi critici verso la biofiction: la pre-storia delle riscritture).
The last seventy years have witnessed a proliferation of fictions with historical figures as main characters, whose biographies are included in the plot of the story. This first part of my work begins with an introduction of the cultural changes in the second half of the XX century that have brought about this diffusion, especially focusing on the modifying concepts of authoriality, originality, intertextuality as effect of linguistic, semiological and philosophical studies (the contribution of Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Michele Foucault are here analyzed). Then, the attention shifts to the reception of the French thought into the United States, meaning, to Hayden White’s ‘decoding’ of Foucault, to New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. It concludes with a survey of feminism, the feminist reader and criticism, the feminist subject in and beyond the sex/gender dichotomy, and the complex interaction between the feminist and the Foucauldian discourses. The interacting ideas of history, power, narration of the contemporary epistemology suggest that feminist rewritings may be able to provide some sort of ‘truth’, finally evoking the last obsessions of the French philosopher: some of these kinds of biofictions might indeed be read as a Greek parrēsia (παρρησία), the citizens’ faculty of expressing their own opinion in a public arena.
PART 2 (Il ‘genere’ letterario delle biofiction)
As I make clear from the title, I attempt here to discern a particular voice of biofiction among the many historiographic metafictions and “fiction biographies” (Naomi Jacob’s definition for non-traditional biographies), in a way that narrows their definition to narrations that, even if affected by hybridism, show recognizable characteristics. With the help offered by previous studies on the subject and the possible world semantics I compare then different biographical rewritings so as to distinguish texts with overt self-reflections from others where artificiality is not so highly stressed; fictions that exploit historical names only to ‘recombine’ them with identities and ideas ‘foreign’ to the original from ‘reconstructions’ where the fictional world is only slightly different with respect to its equivalent of the tradition (it is, paradoxically, this type of ‘semantically full’ rewriting that entails the consultation of history books for its criticism).
This section also investigates the ethical issues involved in the process of narrativization of history and regarding the theoretic description of the subject, both fictional and non-fictional. Afterwards, it examines some books of the French-English author Michèle Roberts, whose writing, one of the most successful artistic developing of the French psychoanalytic feminism of the 70s, is also very recognizable - kind of a“language of the body” entwined with other specific obsessions of the writer like food, sex, Catholic religion and the cultural collision between England and France. It seems to me that, her fictional worlds in the biofictions The Wild Girl, 1984, and Fair Exchange, 1999, The Mistressclass (2003) may be considered as part of the ‘galaxy’ of a writing subject. I call this ‘horizontal method’.
Part III (Quattro soggetti donna nel circolo di Shelley e il brusio dei discorsi sotto al foglio della storia)
This part is entirely dedicated to explore the strategies of Mab’s Daughters: Shelley’s Wives and Lovers: Their Own Story by Judith Chernaik, a case of possible-world biofiction focused on the years 1816-17 of the Shelley circle and narrated from the eccentric prospective of four female subjects: Harriet Westbrook, Percy Shelley’s first wife; Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, caught in her writing of Frankenstein and still unknown by her contemporary; Fanny Godwin, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and Gilbert Imlay; Claire Clairmont, the second-born of Mary Jane Clairmont who was adopted by William Godwin. The large amount of documents consulted as a part of the interpretative process has included private and public writings such as biographies, autobiographies, novels, poems, and, in the case of the character Mary Shelly, also manuscripts of the authentic journals.
The analysis, exploiting the suggestions offered by the intercrossing perspectives of the novel, explores the modulations of the concept of identity in their phases of textual desegregation and reconstruction, emphasizing reflections on ideological stances and personal prejudices in the formation of the biographical and literary canon (I found particularly fascinating the quite overt ‘discourse’ on Mary Shelley as provided by the ‘left criticism’ in K.N. Cameron, D.H. Reiman, eds, Shelley and his Circle: 1773-1882, Harvard UP, Cambridge, MA ), as well as the collision between the concept of uniqueness and reproducibility and the relevance of the mark of ‘gender’ in the politics of language.
I call this method ‘vertical’ because it explores a biofiction deconstructing and reconstructing its synchronic and diachronic voices in the many and sometimes colliding discourses of history.
PART IV ( Postscriptum. Mab’s daughters e le ‘quinte prospettive’. Ricerche aperte)
The Postscriptum reflects upon some specific features of Mab’s daughters, a case of biofiction written by a scholar (kind of a ‘manuscript-rewriting’); and, taking into consideration an other biofiction of the same author (The Daughter, a Novel Based on the Life of Eleanor Marx, a rewriting of the life of the daughter of the ‘father’ of Communism, Karl Marx), suggests that the two methods of interpretation are not, finally, mutually exclusive. Some possible suggestions for further research also provided in this part, such as a symptomatic study on feminist rewritings set in the Romantic Age (Michèle Roberts’ Fair Exchange and Judith Chernaik’s Mab’s Daughters are, in some ways, similar) .
Research Interests: Gender, Intertextuality, Postmodernism, Feminism, Michel Foucault, and 24 moreHayden White, Charlotte Brontë, Michèle Roberts, Historiographic Metafictions, Narratology and Postmodern Literature, Mary Shelley, Sequels, parodies, rewritings, Biofiction, Riscritture, Femminismo, Frankenstein Mary Shelley, Fair Exchange, Judith Cehernaik, Mab's Daughters, Judith Chernaik, Judith Chernaik, Biografie Fittizie Di Personaggi Storici, The Mistressclass, Daughters of the House, The Daughter Judith Chernaik, The Daughter Judith Chernaik, Recombinant Fiction, Recombinant Fiction, Martin Middeke, and Martin Middeke
La figura del corpo, atipico e in decadenza, con allusioni animalesche e e intertestuali, visionario e mortale, sembra costituire un’ossessione della scrittura coetzeeana. Questo studio si propone di investigarne i molteplici livelli... more
La figura del corpo, atipico e in decadenza, con allusioni animalesche e e intertestuali, visionario e mortale, sembra costituire un’ossessione della scrittura coetzeeana. Questo studio si propone di investigarne i molteplici livelli interpretativi attraverso le analisi di Waiting for the
Barbarians e Life and Times of Michael K, ove il corpo è al centro di un problematico rapporto con le categorie di linguaggio, violenza e verità. L'ineludibile questione della valenza politica dei testi è dunque affrontata con l’ausilio di metodologie critiche decostruttive, che esplorano i meccanismi narratologici comuni ad entrambi i testi ed evidenziano la necessità di letture non mutualmente esclusive.
The figure of the body, atypical and decandent, visionary and substantial, with animal and intertextual features, seems to emerge as an obsession in the writings of J. M. Coetzee. This work is an attempt to investigate multilayered interpretations through the analyses of Waiting for the Barbarians and Lives and Times of Michael K, where the body confronts categories such as language, violence and truth. The political relevance of the novels is therefore explored by allowing deconstructive critical metodologies to reveal the narratological devices shared by the two texts and point up the need for readings that are not mutually exclusive.
Barbarians e Life and Times of Michael K, ove il corpo è al centro di un problematico rapporto con le categorie di linguaggio, violenza e verità. L'ineludibile questione della valenza politica dei testi è dunque affrontata con l’ausilio di metodologie critiche decostruttive, che esplorano i meccanismi narratologici comuni ad entrambi i testi ed evidenziano la necessità di letture non mutualmente esclusive.
The figure of the body, atypical and decandent, visionary and substantial, with animal and intertextual features, seems to emerge as an obsession in the writings of J. M. Coetzee. This work is an attempt to investigate multilayered interpretations through the analyses of Waiting for the Barbarians and Lives and Times of Michael K, where the body confronts categories such as language, violence and truth. The political relevance of the novels is therefore explored by allowing deconstructive critical metodologies to reveal the narratological devices shared by the two texts and point up the need for readings that are not mutually exclusive.
Research Interests: Postcolonial Studies, Pain, Deconstruction, Politics, Stereotypes, and 23 moreTruth, Body, Postcolonial Literature, Nadine Gordimer, Postmodernism (Literature), J. M. Coetzee, Barbarians, South Africa, Storia, Colour, Waiting for the Barbarians, Shape, Resistenza, Tortura, The Life and Times of Michael K, Alterità, Sudafrica, Seppellimento, Corpo Mortale, Significati, Magistrato, Specificità, and Instabilità
Il saggio di Valentina Vannucci esamina la consapevolezza storica che emerge dalle biofiction postmoderne, cercando di definire la posizione di quei testi nel panorama critico contemporaneo. Le biofiction negano le biografie canoniche pur... more
Il saggio di Valentina Vannucci esamina la consapevolezza storica che emerge dalle biofiction postmoderne, cercando di definire la posizione di quei testi nel panorama critico contemporaneo. Le biofiction negano le biografie canoniche pur fondandosi su segni biografici ben riconoscibili. Assumendo come protagoniste figure del passato ‘descritte’ si affrancano da criteri di obiettività canonica e scardinano i concetti canonici di identità, identità storica e storia, dando vita a un ibrido che decostruisce, con il pretesto di rivisitarlo, il romanzo storico contemporaneo.
Research Interests:
Il saggio di Valentina Vannucci esamina la consapevolezza storica che emerge dalle biofiction postmoderne, cercando di definire la posizione di questi testi nel panorama critico contemporaneo. This essay analyses the type of historical... more
Il saggio di Valentina Vannucci esamina la consapevolezza storica che emerge dalle biofiction postmoderne, cercando di definire la posizione di questi testi nel panorama critico contemporaneo.
This essay analyses the type of historical consciousness that emerges from the postmodern genre of biofiction and the position of its texts within the contemporary critical debate.
Valentina Vannucci è Dottore di ricerca in Anglistica e Americanistica.
Si occupa di letteratura postcoloniale e neostoricismo, della controversia contemporanea sulla revisione del canone letterario e del metaromanzo biografico in lingua inglese. Ha scritto su J.M. Coetzee e Judith Chernaik.
Valentina Vannucci holds a PhD in English and American Literature from the University of Florence. Her fields of interest and research include postcolonial literature, neo-historicism, the contemporary critical debate
around the revision of the literary canon and the biographic metafiction. She wrote essays on J.M Coetzee and Judith Chernaik
This essay analyses the type of historical consciousness that emerges from the postmodern genre of biofiction and the position of its texts within the contemporary critical debate.
Valentina Vannucci è Dottore di ricerca in Anglistica e Americanistica.
Si occupa di letteratura postcoloniale e neostoricismo, della controversia contemporanea sulla revisione del canone letterario e del metaromanzo biografico in lingua inglese. Ha scritto su J.M. Coetzee e Judith Chernaik.
Valentina Vannucci holds a PhD in English and American Literature from the University of Florence. Her fields of interest and research include postcolonial literature, neo-historicism, the contemporary critical debate
around the revision of the literary canon and the biographic metafiction. She wrote essays on J.M Coetzee and Judith Chernaik
Research Interests:
Bloomsbury has published the first anthology of biofiction. What is the nature of biofiction? How is it different from biography and historical fiction? How is it similar? What kind of "truth" does biofiction picture? How does it... more
Bloomsbury has published the first anthology of biofiction. What is the nature of biofiction? How is it different from biography and historical fiction? How is it similar? What kind of "truth" does biofiction picture? How does it access and represent history and give us new ways of thinking about history? Hoe does it engage the political? This reader, which consists of a wide range of writings, answers these and many other questions.