Abstract
As an introduction to the volume, this chapter explores recent developments relating to the study and practice of biography across nations and cultures, discussing key issues in the humanities that have significant implications for writing the lives of writers, musicians and visual artists. These include the resurgence in scholarly interest in artists’ biographies; the rise of biofiction and the ways in which this mode of writing is distinguished from biography; the death and return of the Author; and the prominence that transnationality has assumed in studies of life writing, challenging the traditional framework of the nation-state. It also outlines the aims and scope of the volume, and concludes with a one-paragraph summary of each of its chapters in turn.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Birnbaum, Phyllis. 2006. Glory in a Line: A life of Foujita: The Artist Caught Between East and West. New York: Faber and Faber.
Boldrini, Lucia and Julia Novak, eds. 2017. Experiments in Life Writing: Intersections of Auto/biography and Fiction. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Burke, Sean. 2007 [1992]. The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Clavin, Patricia. 2005. ‘Defining Transnationalism’. Contemporary European History 14, no. 4: 421–39.
Codell, Julie F. 2003. The Victorian Artist: Artists’ Life writings in Britain, ca. 1870–1910. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deacon, Desley, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott, eds. 2010. Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700–Present. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dović, Marijan and Jón Karl Helgason, eds. 2017. National Poets, Cultural Saints: Canonization and Commemorative Cults of Writers in Europe. Leiden: Brill.
Esner, Rachel and Sandra Kisters, eds. 2017. The Mediatization of the Artist. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fastert, Sabine, Alexis Joachimides and Verena Krieger, eds. 2011. Die Wiederkehr des Künstlers: Themen und Positionen der aktuellen Künstler/innenforschung. Cologne: Böhlau.
Fleming, Paul. 2008. Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Franssen, Gaston and Rick Honings, eds. 2017. Idolizing Authorship: Literary Celebrity and the Construction of Identity, 1800 to the Present. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Goldman, Jane. 2012 [2006]. The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Golovlev, Alexander. 2018. ‘Sounds of Music from Across the Sea: Musical Transnationality in Early Post-World War II Austria’. In The Yearbook of National History, vol. 1, edited by Thomas Adam, pp. 165–89. Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Hart, Matthew. 2010. Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism and Synthetic Vernacular Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hauschild, Jan-Christoph and Michael Werner. 1997. Das Zweck des Lebens ist das Leben selbst: Heinrich Heine: eine Biographie. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch.
Hellwig, Karin. 2005. Von der Vita zur Künstlerbiographie. Berlin: Akademie.
Honings, Rick. 2017. ‘The Dutch Byron: Nicolaas Beets (1828–1906)’. In Idolizing Authorship: Literary Celebrity and the Construction of Identity, 1800 to the Present, edited by Gaston Franssen and Rick Honings, pp. 59–81. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Iriye, Akira. 2013. Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present and Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Iriye, Akira and Pierre-Yves Saunier, eds. 2009. The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History: From the Mid-19th Century to the Present Day. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jolly, Margaretta, ed. 2001. Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. London: Fitzroy Dearborn.
Junod, Karen. 2010. Writing the Lives of Painters: Biography and Artistic Identity in Britain, 1760–1810. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Keller, Thomas. 2013. ‘Transkulturelle Biographik und Kulturgeschichte: Deutsch-Französische Lebensgeschichten’. Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 38, no. 1: 121–71.
Kisters, Sandra. 2017. The Lure of the Biographical: On the Self-representation of Modern Artists. Amsterdam: Valiz.
Kris, Ernst and Otto Kurz. 1979. Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment. Translated by Alastair Laing and Lottie M. Newman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Lackey, Michael. 2016. ‘Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction’. a/b: Auto/biography Studies 31, no. 1: 3–10.
Lackey, Michael, ed. 2017. Biographical Fiction: A Reader. New York: Bloomsbury.
Lackey, Michael, ed. 2019. Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions Across the Globe. New York: Bloomsbury.
Lajta-Novak, Julia. 2017. ‘Feminist to Postfeminist: Contemporary Biofictions by and About Women Artists’. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 22, no. 1: 223–30.
Lee, Hermione. 2009. Biography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Leerssen, Joep and Ann Rigney, eds. 2014. Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-Building and Centenary Fever. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
McCooey, David. 2017. ‘The Limits of Life Writing’. Life Writing 14, no. 3: 277–80.
Parke, Catherine N. 2002 [1996]. Biography: Writing Lives. New York: Routledge.
Renders, Hans, Binne de Haan and Jonne Harmsma. 2017. The Biographical Turn: Lives in History. London: Routledge.
Saunders, Max. 2010. Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schweiger, Hannes. 2012. ‘Global Subjects: The Transnationalisation of Biography’. Life Writing 9, no. 3: 249–58.
Smith, Ali. 2015 [2014]. How to Be Both. London: Penguin.
Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd ed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Soussloff, Catherine M. 1997. The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Wiley, Christopher. 2003. ‘“A Relic of an Age Still Capable of a Romantic Outlook”: Musical Biography and The Master Musicians Series, 1899–1906’. Comparative Criticism 25 (November): 161–202.
Wiley, Christopher. 2008. Re-writing Composers’ Lives: Critical Historiography and Musical Biography, 2 vols. PhD diss., University of London.
Wiley, Christopher. 2015. ‘Musical Biography and the Myth of the Muse’. In Critical Music Historiography: Probing Canons, Ideologies and Institutions, edited by Vesa Kurkela and Markus Mantere, pp. 251–61. Farnham: Ashgate.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rensen, M., Wiley, C. (2020). Writing Artists’ Lives Across Nations and Cultures: Biography, Biofiction and Transnationality. In: Rensen, M., Wiley, C. (eds) Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-45199-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-45200-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)