Abstract: | Assumptions and norms about factual narratives and fiction have drastically changed over the postmodern years that one encounters ‘life writing’ and the subjects it treats from a very different (and differing) reading position and set of experiences with the narrative, both written and visual.
For a long time the most traditional genre of ‘life writing’, biography has shown a more receptive attitude to stylistic innovations turning into a hot and lucrative hybrid genre, i.e. biofiction and metabiography. Therein, varying in the extent to which these novels either raise awareness of the self-reflexivity of the writing, or metabiographically centre on the epistemological problem of recounting a life, David Lodge’s Author, Author (2003) and The Year of Henry James: The Story of a Novel (2006) might be said to fit into the postmodern popular genre of biofictions and metabiographies since they function like useful guides mixing warnings with hints, descriptions with explanations, and since they also entangle readers in a game with the ficto-historical material, where the factual world may be suspended but hardly done away with. |
