INTRODUCTION: Negotiating biofiction’s territories

Biofiction is a perplexing and elusive literary form, and this is in part because time and space radically impact the way it is characterized, experienced, aestheticized, and mobilized. For example, coming from colonized Ireland, Oscar Wilde championed biofiction in the late 1880s as an aesthetic force that empowers people to transcend their historical conditioning and to create alternative ways of personal and political being. Such a view, however, was considered by Marxist critics a form of philosophical and political blasphemy, as we can see from Georg Lukács’s now canonical text, The Historical Novel, published in Russian in 1937, in which he denounces the biographical form of the historical novel as aesthetically irredeemable because it fails to incarnate and therefore accurately represent the past, which, for Lukács, should be the primary aesthetic goal of a historically inflected literary work. In the hyper-patriarchal United States, biofiction was condescendingly considered in 1955 by the cultural critic, Carl Bode, a “bosomy” woman, who, in her superficial way, has donned “flimsy clothing tattered and torn in exactly the wrong places” (in Lackey 2017: 269) - nothing, perhaps, better exposes the degree to which a person’s time inflects one’s conception of a literary form than a patriarchal male’s dismissive remarks about biofiction as a bosomy woman. And in France, in the wake of poststructuralism’s destabilization of ontological certainties and of postmodernism’s assertions of the rhetorical, rather than factual, nature of historical discourse, the literary critic Alain Buisine coined the term biofiction in a 1990 lecture in which he claimed that “that the biographical is no longer separate from fiction” (in Buisine 2017: 163; a more literal translation would be, “the biographical is no longer the other of fiction,” see Buisine 1991: 10). Four writers from distinct periods produced very different ways of thinking about the same literary form.