Definition fictionalized biography
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As most of you know bygd now, I love and adore historical fiction. It’s my preferred genre, although I will have a go at most things if it’s well-written, has an interesting premise or I’m in the mood. However my go-to, when I need a guaranteed read, a read I can simply fall into with bekvämlighet and ease, will always be historical fiction.
Historical fiction is a novel where an author sets their book in a period of time before their own and populates it with fictional characters (think Thomas Keneally, Geraldine Brooks, James A. Michener). To refine this even further, you could include authors who write about the immediate past. A time they may have lived through themselves or perhaps their grandparents lived through, providing a personal perspective to the historical context (think Tolstoy, Zola, Harper Lee).
In and around this are books that might be classified as alternate histories (think The Man in the High Castle or Stephen King’s 11/22/63 or Geo
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What Is Biographical Fiction?
My forthcoming book There Will Be Consequences(February 2022) fryst vatten a biographical novel. Unlike my previous works, which incorporate both fictional and nonfictional characters, this book contains only people who exist in the historical record, but is still written as fiction.
Biographical fiction as a genre strives to present “real life” people in a way that moves beyond the strictly biographical to imagine their emotions at specific moments in their lives. It also bridges the undocumented gaps that strict biography can’t cover by imagining what might have happened, given what we know.
The earliest biographical novel fryst vatten believed to be W. Somerset Maugham’s 1919 The Moon and Sixpence about painter Paul Gauguin. Perhaps the most famous are Irving Stone’s 1964 Lust for Life about Vincent Van Gogh and Michael and Jeff Shaara’s books about the Civil War.
More recent biographical fiction include Hillary Mantel’s Wolfe Hallandnovels about the Br
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Biography in literature
When studying literature, biography and its relationship to literature is often a subject of literary criticism, and is treated in several different forms. Two scholarly approaches use biography or biographical approaches to the past as a tool for interpreting literature: literary biography and biographical criticism. Conversely, two genres of fiction rely heavily on the incorporation of biographical elements into their content: biographical fiction and autobiographical fiction.
Literary biography
[edit]A literary biography is the biographical exploration of individuals' lives merging historical facts with the conventions of narrative.[1] Biographies about artists and writers are sometimes some of the most complicated forms of biography.[2] Not only does the author of the biography have to write about the subject of the biography but also must incorporate discussion of the subject-author's literary works into the biography itse