biography genre conventions

Definition of Biography

A biography is the non- fiction , written history or account of a person’s life. Biographies are intended to give an objective portrayal of a person, written in the third person. Biographers collect information from the subject (if he/she is available), acquaintances of the subject, or in researching other sources such as reference material, experts, records, diaries, interviews, etc. Most biographers intend to present the life story of a person and establish the context of their story for the reader, whether in terms of history and/or the present day. In turn, the reader can be reasonably assured that the information presented about the biographical subject is as true and authentic as possible.

Biographies can be written about a person at any time, no matter if they are living or dead. However, there are limitations to biography as a literary device. Even if the subject is involved in the biographical process, the biographer is restricted in terms of access to the subject’s thoughts or feelings.

Biographical works typically include details of significant events that shape the life of the subject as well as information about their childhood, education, career, and relationships. Occasionally, a biography is made into another form of art such as a film or dramatic production. The musical production of “Hamilton” is an excellent example of a biographical work that has been turned into one of the most popular musical productions in Broadway history.

Common Examples of Biographical Subjects

Most people assume that the subject of a biography must be a person who is famous in some way. However, that’s not always the case. In general, biographical subjects tend to be interesting people who have pioneered something in their field of expertise or done something extraordinary for humanity. In addition, biographical subjects can be people who have experienced something unusual or heartbreaking, committed terrible acts, or who are especially gifted and/or talented.

As a literary device, biography is important because it allows readers to learn about someone’s story and history. This can be enlightening, inspiring, and meaningful in creating connections. Here are some common examples of biographical subjects:

• political leaders
• entrepreneurs
• historical figures
• serial killers
• notorious people
• political activists
• adventurers/explorers
• religious leaders
• military leaders
• cultural figures

Famous Examples of Biographical Works

The readership for biography tends to be those who enjoy learning about a certain person’s life or overall field related to the person. In addition, some readers enjoy the literary form of biography independent of the subject. Some biographical works become well-known due to either the person’s story or the way the work is written, gaining a readership of people who may not otherwise choose to read biography or are unfamiliar with its form.

Here are some famous examples of biographical works that are familiar to many readers outside of biography fans:

• Alexander Hamilton (Ron Chernow)
• Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Caroline Fraser)
• Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
• Churchill: A Life (Martin Gilbert)
• The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (Simon Winchester)
• A Beautiful Mind (Sylvia Nasar)
• The Black Rose (Tananarive Due)
• John Adams (David McCullough)
• Into the Wild ( Jon Krakauer )
• John Brown (W.E.B. Du Bois)
• Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (Hayden Herrera)
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot)
• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Doris Kearns Goodwin)
• Shirley Jackson : A Rather Haunted Life ( Ruth Franklin)
• the stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit (Michael Finkel)

Difference Between Biography, Autobiography, and Memoir

Biography, autobiography , and memoir are the three main forms used to tell the story of a person’s life. Though there are similarities between these forms, they have distinct differences in terms of the writing, style , and purpose.

A biography is an informational narrative and account of the life history of an individual person, written by someone who is not the subject of the biography. An autobiography is the story of an individual’s life, written by that individual. In general, an autobiography is presented chronologically with a focus on key events in the person’s life. Since the writer is the subject of an autobiography, it’s written in the first person and considered more subjective than objective, like a biography. In addition, autobiographies are often written late in the person’s life to present their life experiences, challenges, achievements, viewpoints, etc., across time.

Memoir refers to a written collection of a person’s significant memories, written by that person. Memoir doesn’t generally include biographical information or chronological events unless it’s relevant to the story being presented. The purpose of memoir is reflection and an intention to share a meaningful story as a means of creating an emotional connection with the reader. Memoirs are often presented in a narrative style that is both entertaining and thought-provoking.

Examples of Biography in Literature

An important subset of biography is literary biography. A literary biography applies biographical study and form to the lives of artists and writers. This poses some complications for writers of literary biographies in that they must balance the representation of the biographical subject, the artist or writer, as well as aspects of the subject’s literary works. This balance can be difficult to achieve in terms of judicious interpretation of biographical elements within an author’s literary work and consideration of the separate spheres of the artist and their art.

Literary biographies of artists and writers are among some of the most interesting biographical works. These biographies can also be very influential for readers, not only in terms of understanding the artist or writer’s personal story but the context of their work or literature as well. Here are some examples of well-known literary biographies:

Example 1:  Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay  (Nancy Milford)

One of the first things Vincent explained to Norma was that there was a certain freedom of language in the Village that mustn’t shock her. It wasn’t vulgar. ‘So we sat darning socks on Waverly Place and practiced the use of profanity as we stitched. Needle in, . Needle out, piss. Needle in, . Needle out, c. Until we were easy with the words.’

This passage reflects the way in which Milford is able to characterize St. Vincent Millay as a person interacting with her sister. Even avid readers of a writer’s work are often unaware of the artist’s private and personal natures, separate from their literature and art. Milford reflects the balance required on the part of a literary biographer of telling the writer’s life story without undermining or interfering with the meaning and understanding of the literature produced by the writer. Though biographical information can provide some influence and context for a writer’s literary subjects, style, and choices , there is a distinction between the fictional world created by a writer and the writer’s “real” world. However, a literary biographer can illuminate the writer’s story so that the reader of both the biography and the biographical subject’s literature finds greater meaning and significance.

Example 2:  The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens  (Claire Tomalin)

The season of domestic goodwill and festivity must have posed a problem to all good Victorian family men with more than one family to take care of, particularly when there were two lots of children to receive the demonstrations of paternal love.

Tomalin’s literary biography of Charles Dickens reveals the writer’s extramarital relationship with a woman named Nelly Ternan. Tomalin presents the complications that resulted for Dickens from this relationship in terms of his personal and family life as well as his professional writing and literary work. Revealing information such as an extramarital relationship can influence the way a reader may feel about the subject as a person, and in the case of literary biography it can influence the way readers feel about the subject’s literature as well. Artists and writers who are beloved , such as Charles Dickens, are often idealized by their devoted readers and society itself. However, as Tomalin’s biography of Dickens indicates, artists and writers are complicated and as subject to human failings as anyone else.

Example 3:  Virginia Woolf  (Hermione Lee)

‘A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living’: so too with the biography of that self. And just as lives don’t stay still, so life-writing can’t be fixed and finalised. Our ideas are shifting about what can be said, our knowledge of human character is changing. The biographer has to pioneer, going ‘ahead of the rest of us, like the miner’s canary, testing the atmosphere , detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions’. So, ‘There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation’. She is talking about the story of Shelley, but she could be talking about her own life-story.

In this passage, Lee is able to demonstrate what her biographical subject, Virginia Woolf, felt about biography and a person telling their own or another person’s story. Literary biographies of well-known writers can be especially difficult to navigate in that both the author and biographical subject are writers, but completely separate and different people. As referenced in this passage by Lee, Woolf was aware of the subtleties and fluidity present in a person’s life which can be difficult to judiciously and effectively relay to a reader on the part of a biographer. In addition, Woolf offers insight into the fact that biographers must make choices in terms of what information is presented to the reader and the context in which it is offered, making them a “miner’s canary” as to how history will view and remember the biographical subject.

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Genre Conventions — The Building Blocks of Genre Storytelling

M ost movies can be characterized as being one genre or the other. If the plot involves a love triangle, that’s most likely romance. If the plot is about a space marine, it’s most likely science-fiction. If the plot involves a group of kids running away from a monster, that’s probably horror. The things that make up the conventions of a genre, also known as genre conventions. What are genre conventions, you ask? You’ll soon be getting an answer via definition, along with plenty of examples.

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Genre Conventions Definition

Defining genre conventions.

We want to provide a brief genre conventions definition before really digging into what they mean and how they are utilized. Conventions of a genre can be used in a lot of different ways, so a straightforward understanding of the basic concept is a must.

GENRE CONVENTIONS DEFINITION

What are genre conventions.

Genre conventions are elements, themes, topics, tropes, characters, situations, and plot beats that are common in specific genres. Genre conventions are what make certain stories the genre that they are. This is why conventions of a genre are made up of specific elements, as these are used to create and identify the genres in question.

What are genre conventions characteristics:

• Plot beats and narrative turns that must almost always occur in the genre the story is set in.
• Characters and settings that are staples of the genre (either directly or subtly).
• Tropes and themes that are almost always part of the genre they are being featured and used in.

What are Conventions in Film

Explaining genre conventions.

Genre conventions work best when you are working exclusively inside the genre you have chosen. This means no mixing or blending of other genres and just focusing on what works for the genre you have chosen. A fantasy story will have a dragon, a knight, a princess, a wizard, and more. A romance story will have a person in love with someone, along with a competing suitor for the protagonist’s love, and a happy ending.

Conventions of a genre do not have to be a checklist, but rather a group of themes and topics that make the genre what it is. For example, a romance story must always have a romance at its center, otherwise it isn’t a romance. And if your romance does not end with the couple living happily ever after, you might alienate the very audience you were writing for. Same if you write a Western that isn’t set in the West, doesn’t have a gunslinger, a showdown, or a sunset; you might upset some, if not all, Western fans.

In many ways, genre conventions exist to give the people what they want. Dragons in fantasy, shootouts in Westerns, monsters in horror, and so on. This is also why plenty of writers have made a living making stories in the same genre, as they know what their audience wants. It’s like the old Greek comedies and tragedies; the genre alone should give you the gist of what you’re about to read or watch.

That said, plenty of movies set in specific genres have broke with convention in one way or another, while still clearly being that genre. A tragic romance can still be a success, as can a Western set in a not-so-Western location. And of course, a horror story can be realistic, so long as there are still victims to terrorize. It’s a careful balancing act, but it’s been done before.

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Genre Conventions List

Obeying and defying conventions.

Some classic and well-known movies have played genre conventions straight, while others have successfully defied them.

The Friday the 13th series as a whole has maintained horror genre conventions to the point of parody (as seen in Jason X ). Each film involves a killer coming after a group of youngsters, successfully killing off a lot of them before being defeated by someone (most often the Final Girl who has survived the killer’s attacks).

Where are conventions in film?  •  Friday the 13th

Alien is a classic film that, while mostly horror, is set in outer space. So aside from the setting, its horror genre conventions are played completely straight. There’s a group of people on an isolated freighter who are hunted down by an unknown and frightening monster. In the end, only one crew member remains, and it is up to them to take this monster out for good. You can read our Alien script breakdown for more in-depth analysis on how it balanced sci-fi with horror.

Crime films tend to follow certain paths that cover similar beats and end results. Many of these are either noir , neo-noir, or noir influenced, like Chinatown. One of the very best neo-noirs of all-time , Chinatown follows a detective investigating a mysterious murder. Like all crime stories, he follows clues before falling into serious danger himself, culminating in his discovery of who was behind it all. And since it’s noir, the ending is usually a downer, even if the detective was able to solve the crime.

Then you have Memento , a noir-influenced crime movie unlike any other. The protagonist suffers from memory loss and there are two parallel storylines; one told chronologically, the other reverse-chronological. A risky move, but it paid off for director Christopher Nolan , as it is considered one of Nolan’s best films , along with having one of the best plot twists in recent memory.

Genre conventions list  •  Memento

Romance movies tend to be among the most conventional with their stories and plots, but some movies manage to shake things up. One of the best romantic comedies of all time is (500) Days of Summer , a rom-com that says outright it is “not a love story.” The film is told out of order as it follows our male lead and how he fell too hard for the titular Summer, how his expectations got the better of him, and how he eventually learned to move on.

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Then you have Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World , the definition of a movie that defies genre categorization. Video game references, musical fight scenes, and wild visual effects helped make this movie into the cult sensation it is today. That said, the main plot is still very much a romance: boy meets girl, boy has to fight for girl, boy loses girl, boy comes back stronger than ever for girl, boy and girl try again.

These are just some examples of movies that obey or defy genre conventions in their own special ways. There’s no shortage of scripts you can read online that follow the familiar path, go in a totally different direction, or do something in-between. Following conventions of a genre is more than okay, as many other successful films have proven, but sometimes going off the beaten path pays off, too.

Ultimate Movie Genre Guide

Now that we’ve gone over genre conventions, we can look at the many genres that make up the cinema landscape. Our ultimate guide covers nearly every genre out there, from general well-known genres to smaller sub-genres, all with plenty of examples.

Up Next: Ultimate Movie Genre Guide →

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Brian K. Goodman

Phd in american studies, harvard university.

What is Biography?

Semester: , offered: .

I was a teaching fellow for this history seminar led by Jill Lepore. Here is the course description: "Biographers write histories of lives. Their storytelling is often novelistic but their standards of evidence are those of the historian. They confront distinctive questions: What lives are worth writing? What is the relationship between the individual and society? What rules govern the relationship between biographers and their subjects? How has the art of biography changed over the centuries, and what forces have driven those changes? In this section, we’ll read both notable biographies and the critical literature on biography as a genre that is often seen to be at odds with the conventions of other kinds of historical writing." 

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10 Genre Conventions, Explained

Genre conventions are established rules, traits, characteristics, and elements that are commonly associated with and accepted within a particular genre of art, literature, film, or other forms of media.

A simple definition comes from Christine Nord (2018):

“Genre conventions are the result of the standardization of communication practices. As certain kinds of text are used repeatedly in certain situations with more or less the same function or functions, these texts acquire conventional forms.” (Nord, 2018)

These conventions help both creators and audiences identify and categorize a work within its specific genre. Conventions might include specific themes, styles, structures, or motifs that are often repeated within works of the same genre.

10 Elements of Genre Conventions

There are many elements of a genre that combine to create conventional forms and tropes within cultural texts. These can include theme, setting, character, iconography, tone, and so on.

Below are just a few of the many elements of genre:

• Themes and Topics : This refers to the central ideas or subjects that are recurrent within a specific genre. For example, redemption is a common theme in Western films, the overwhelming power of love is recurrent in romances, and moral dilemmas are common in science fiction films.
• Setting : This refers to the time and place in which the story occurs. Fantasy genres often employ a medieval Europe setting, and science fiction films often take place in space.
• Characters: This refers to the specific types and archetypes of protagonists, antagonists, and supporting roles commonly found in a particular genre. For instance, detective noir films often have a hard-boiled private investigator, while fairy tales might have a damsel in distress and a gallant knight.
• Plot Structure: This pertains to the way the narrative is constructed and unfolds. Mystery genres often have complex plots with unexpected twists, while hero’s journey narratives are structured around a character’s personal growth and challenges.
• Tone and Mood: This refers to the emotional atmosphere of the story. Horror films create a mood of suspense and dread, while comedies aim for a light-hearted, humorous tone.
• Narrative Voice: This relates to the perspective from which the story is told. First-person narratives are common in memoirs and autobiographies, while omniscient narrators might be found in epic fantasies.
• Iconography: This pertains to the recurring symbolic images that represent certain themes or ideas within a genre. Gothic novels, for example, might use dark castles and stormy nights to symbolize danger and the unknown.
• Conflict and Resolution: This refers to the challenges faced by the protagonists and how they overcome them. Adventure genres may focus on physical challenges and battles, while dramas may center on emotional or relational conflicts.
• Style and Pacing: This relates to how the story is presented in terms of language, cinematography, or other artistic choices. Action films often have fast pacing with quick cuts, while period dramas might be slower and more focused on detailed settings and dialogues.
• Moral and Philosophical Underpinnings: This refers to the deeper messages or lessons that a genre might aim to convey. Dystopian novels often question societal norms and values, while parables convey moral lessons through allegorical tales.

The Purpose of Genre Conventions

While genre conventions are oftentimes arbitrary social constructs, they also serve important purposes, which is why societies have developed them.

According to Gina Macdonald, genre conventions serve two purposes:

1. A framework for writers

Writers often appreciate genre convention because they help guide the writers on their journey.

As Macdonald (1997) notes: “they provide writers a ready-made framework of plot schemes, conflicts, values, and patterns on which to build their individual concerns.”

Similarly, Nord (2018) notes that writers can benefit from genre-conventions because it allows them to communicate their meaning in an agreed-upon fashion that readers can quickly understand: “authors have to comply with the conventions if they want to carry out their communicative intentions” (Nord, 2018).

Take an essay, for example. It is conventional to have an introduction that signposts the author’s thesis. This helps the writer remember to include helpful elements at the beginning of the text, which the writer knows their audience will be expecting.

2. Guidance and comfort for readers

Readers often enjoy when texts follow genre forms because genre conventions provide readers with “the security and pleasure of familiar patterns” (Macdonald, 1997).

When readers consume a text that contains genre conventions, they will be able to infer familiar plotlines, character relationships, and so on, which make the readers feel well-oriented and clear about what the text is doing.

As Ornia (2016) argues: “Genre conventions are signs for the reader, which allow for distinctions between different genres and trigger users’ expectations, helping them to understand a text” (Ornia, 2016).

To take the previous example about an essay, the inclusion of an introduction that signposts the author’s thesis helps the reader to understand what the essay is about from the outset, which makes them feel oriented and fends off potential confusion.

Genre Conventions Examples

1. gothic fiction.

Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre that combines elements of horror and romance, and it emerged in the late 18th century.

Here are some of its conventions:

• Setting: Gothic fiction predominantly takes place in isolated, decrepit, and often antiquated settings. Common locales include old castles, mansions, and abbeys that carry a haunting, mysterious atmosphere. These settings frequently feature labyrinths, secret passages, and dungeons.
• Atmosphere: The mood in Gothic fiction is one of brooding and melancholy. There’s a prevalent sense of foreboding, heightened by elements such as inclement weather, darkness, or eerie landscapes.
• Characters: Central characters in Gothic fiction often include a virtuous heroine, a Byronic hero with a dark past, and malevolent villains. Supernatural entities, like ghosts, vampires, or otherworldly creatures, are also commonplace.
• Themes: Themes of confinement, persecution, and the supernatural are recurrent. There’s often a blurring line between reality and the supernatural, leading to ambiguity about whether supernatural occurrences are real or imagined.

2. Film Noir

Film noir is a cinematic genre that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, known for its dark and moody atmosphere.

Here are four of its conventions:

• Visual Style: One of the most distinctive features of film noir is its high-contrast lighting, known as chiaroscuro. Scenes are often drenched in shadows, with sharp angles and interplays of light and dark, creating a sense of mystery and foreboding. This technique is used to emphasize the moral ambiguity and the dual nature of characters.
• Femme Fatale: A recurring character in film noir is the femme fatale, a seductive and mysterious woman. She often leads the protagonist into danger or acts as an antagonist. She is characterized by her wit, allure, and often duplicitous nature, representing both desire and danger.
• Themes of Fate and Moral Ambiguity: Film noir frequently delves into themes of destiny, existentialism, and the inescapability of fate. Characters often find themselves in situations beyond their control, trapped by circumstances or past decisions. The line between right and wrong is blurred, with characters making morally ambiguous choices, reflecting the complexities of human nature.

3. Epic Fantasy

Epic fantasy, often simply referred to as “high fantasy,” is a subgenre of fantasy fiction characterized by grand scale, intricate plots, and a vast, often invented, world.

• Expansive World-Building: One of the hallmarks of epic fantasy is its vast and detailed world-building. The setting often includes multiple kingdoms or realms, each with its own history, culture, languages, and politics. These worlds are frequently enriched with detailed maps, ancient prophecies, and complex mythologies.
• Grand Quests: Central to many epic fantasy narratives is a grand quest or mission. This quest, often undertaken by a group of diverse characters, is of paramount importance, with the fate of the world or its inhabitants hanging in the balance. It’s not uncommon for this journey to span continents and face numerous challenges, from deadly creatures to intricate riddles.
• Moral Dichotomy: Epic fantasy often portrays a clear distinction between good and evil. While there may be morally ambiguous characters, there’s usually a discernible difference between the forces of light and darkness. This dichotomy is often embodied in epic battles, magical artifacts, or prophesied heroes and villains.

Selective and Enabling Constraints for Genre Writers

In the context of genre conventions, “Selective Constraints” and “Enabling Constraints” refer to the limitations and possibilities that are inherent in a specific genre.

Both types of constraints play a role in guiding and shaping the creation of works within a genre.

1. Selective Constraints

Selective constraints are the specific rules, conventions, and expectations that a creator must adhere to when working within a particular genre (Kessler & Watts, 2020).

They help in defining and maintaining the identity of the genre. By adhering to these constraints, creators ensure that their work is recognizable and categorizable within the specific genre.

For example:

• In a classic detective mystery, the crime (often a murder) must be solved by the end of the story.
• In a traditional romance novel, there’s an expectation of a happy ending for the main characters.
• In a western film, settings like the American frontier and character archetypes like cowboys and outlaws are expected.

2. Enabling Constraints

While they may seem like limitations at first, enabling constraints are elements that open up possibilities for creativity and innovation within the boundaries of the genre (Kessler & Watts, 2020).

Enabling constraints provide a framework or structure that creators can play with, subvert, or reinterpret to bring freshness to the genre (Kessler & Watts, 2020). They challenge creators to think innovatively and offer unique contributions while still staying true to the essence of the genre.

Enabling constraints can lead to the evolution of a genre or the creation of subgenres.

• The fixed structure of a sonnet in poetry can be seen as an enabling constraint. While poets must adhere to a specific rhyme scheme and meter, they have the freedom to explore diverse themes and expressions within that structure.
• The foundational rules of a fairy tale (e.g., the presence of magic, clear delineation of good vs. evil) can be played with to create retellings, parodies, or darker interpretations.
• The setting of a confined spaceship in science fiction can be an enabling constraint, pushing writers to delve deeply into character dynamics and psychological tensions.

Overall, while selective constraints help maintain the identity and consistency of a genre, enabling constraints offer avenues for exploration, innovation, and growth within the genre’s framework.

Playing with Genre: How Authors Undermine our Expectations

The rise of postmodernism since the 1980s has been accompanied with a push to challenge and undermine genre-convention in order to shock consumers and ask them to re-imagine the metanarratives in their minds.

The postmodern perspective highlights that genres are there to be broken and changed over time:

“Genre conventions are not totally stable throughout time; on the contrary, they evolve and change. So translators need to be aware of this possible evolution both in time and space” (Jimenez-Crespo, 2013)

Postmodern literature and art often embraces a fragmented narrative structure as a way to challenge the idea of the “grand metanarrative”. Post-modernists reject the idea that one coherent narrative can explain the world and instead embraces plurality and  contradiction .

As a result, you may find postmodern literature to be active in attempting to play with new genre forms and undermine consumers’ expectations. For some examples, see my article: examples of postmodernism .

Jimenez-Crespo, M. A. (2013). Translation and Web Localization. Taylor & Francis.

Kessler, K., & Watts, L. (2020). Conventions and Obligatory Moments: The Must-Haves to Meet Audience Expectations. Story Grid Publishing LLC.

Macdonald, G. (1997). Robert Ludlum: A Critical Companion. Bloomsbury Academic.

Nord, C. (2018). Translating as a Purposeful Activity: Functionalist Approaches Explained. Taylor & Francis.

Ornia, G. F. (2016). Medical brochure as a textual genre. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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Genre Conventions: Must-Have Elements of Story

What are Genre Conventions?

Genre conventions are specific requirements for the story’s ALTERNATE WORLD , AVATARS , and catalysts that create conflict and enable solutions. Without specific genre conventions, the reader will be confused, unsettled, or bored and quit reading.

Genre Conventions set up genre audience expectations and create the potential for specific change in the OBLIGATORY MOMENTS of a story. Genre conventions help us focus and filter problems and solutions through two broad categories of constraints: selective constraints and enabling constraints. 

What are Selective Constraints?

Selective constraints are elements of the setting, or arena, that help define the problem in a story and put the core need at stake. In the POP ( PROPOSITION OF POSSIBILITY ) analysis, this is also called the CONTEXT . We call conventions related to the context selective because they narrow the field of potential big-picture problems addressed in our stories.

Every context has the potential for external and internal conflict, but the reach and characteristics of the location impact the scope of the problems explored in a story. For example, an expansive landscape with multiple locations sets up a wider range of external conflict. A less varied setting tends to support multiple layers of similar conflicts. When the story is set in a single location, we can explore the internal landscape of the AVATARS more extensively. 

• In ACTION stories, the setting must be a disturbed, unbalanced physical and social environment that gives rise to a threat to life.
• HORROR stories unfold within conventional or mundane settings with fantastical elements and a literal or metaphorical labyrinth. 
• SOCIETY and WAR stories are set against a big canvas with either a widescope external setting or internal landscape.
• WESTERN/EASTERN stories take place in a harsh hostile, wide-open landscape. 
• LOVE , CRIME , THRILLER , PERFORMANCE , STATUS , MORALITY , and WORLDVIEW stories have no specific convention that defines their context, but the setting must give rise to the other conventions and OBLIGATORY MOMENTS of the genre.

Levels of Conflict

Conflict exists within the setting and arises when two forces pursue their opposing goals or natures. We identify conflict on three levels: inner conflict (internal dilemma), personal conflict (between two or more people with opposing goals), and extrapersonal conflict (conflict between a person and the environment, including institutions). All three levels of conflict are bound to exist in any setting, but your context should emphasize the levels that are most important to your story. 

• ACTION stories have dueling hierarchies: power-dominance and growth. Also the power divide between the protagonist and villain is large. 
• In WAR Stories, the protagonists are substantially outnumbered by the antagonists.
• CRIME and THRILLER stories require a large power divide between the protagonist and antagonist. 
• HORROR stories must mask the power of the monster throughout the story until the monster’s massive power advantage is revealed.
• WESTERN/EASTERN stories require fundamental conflict between the individual and society. 
• LOVE stories have many levels of conflict. Love stories must set up an external need beyond love, a moral weight that the AVATARS must carry, and the lovers pursuing ordered and chaotic approaches to love and life.
• In SOCIETY stories, the power divide between those in power and the disenfranchised is large and impacts human needs beyond the core need for Recognition.
• In PERFORMANCE stories, there is a great power divide between the protagonist and antagonist.
• MORALITY stories require a seemingly impossible external conflict forcing the protagonist to choose to share or withhold their gifts.
• STATUS and WORLDVIEW stories feature a social problem as subtext (e.g., racism, misogyny, or poverty). Conflicts between different groups and individuals within the context cause cognitive dissonance to arise within the protagonist.

Examples of Selective Constraints in Genre Conventions

• In Treasure Island , an ACTION story, the setting includes a tropical island, far from authorities in England, where violent pirates with weapons hold the upper hand (personall conflict). The avatars are also susceptible to fatal tropical fevers circulating on the island (extrapersonal conflict). Jim Hawkins, the protagonist, is unsure what strategy he should adopt to defeat the pirates (inner conflict). 
• In Murder on the Orient Express , a CRIME story, the setting is a luxury train traveling from Istanbul to Calais in the 1930s. Poirot must discover the truth from a group of people with secrets they don’t want to reveal (personal conflict). The AVATARS are trapped because of a snowstorm (extrapersonal conflict).The greater context of the story includes a justice system incapable of protecting law-abiding people and restoring justice (extrapersonal conflict). Before the events of the current story, Ratchett, a notorious criminal, was wrongly acquitted of kidnapping and killing a young child. Once Poirot uncovers the truth, he faces a dilemma about how to serve justice (inner conflict).
• The setting of Pride and Prejudice , a LOVE story, is Regency era England, a world of rigid class boundaries and strict standards of behavior. Elizabeth and her sisters can’t earn an independent living, so marriage is the only way to avoid being destitute. At least one of the Bennet sisters must marry a husband willing and able to support the rest, but the social rules of the time mean that the behavior of one sister could ruin the prospects of the others (extrapersonal conflict leading to inner conflict).

What are Enabling Constraints?

Enabling constraints are the characters—or AVATARS —and circumstances—or catalysts—that make it possible for the protagonist to solve the problem presented by the inciting incident. The setting or context is there from the start, and enabling constraints arise from it as potential or actual instruments of conflict that force change along the spectrum of the core value. In other words, enabling constraints cause the effects readers expect to see in the story of a particular genre.

Enabling Constraints increase external conflict, which increases internal conflict. Rising  conflict leads the protagonist to the global CRISIS in the all-is-lost moment.

Characters or AVATARS are used to fulfill certain roles in stories. The two primary avatars in a story are the protagonist and the antagonist. The antagonist’s OBJECT OF DESIRE is always in direct opposition to the protagonist’s goals and desires. Other avatars act to aid or hinder the protagonist’s goals and desires. These figures can be mentors, shapeshifters, sidekicks, threshold guardians, or tricksters.

Avatars pursuing their goals creates conflict in the story, forcing the protagonist to change, but they need the support of catalysts to create life-altering discord in the arena.

• ACTION and WESTERN/EASTERN stories require a hero, villain, and victim.
• CRIME stories feature a professional or amateur detective, a criminal “who makes it personal,” and the victim(s) of the crime.
• HORROR stories feature an unheroic protagonist and a monster that cannot be reasoned with.
• THRILLER stories require a hero, master villain who targets the protagonist, and victims.
• LOVE stories require lovers, rivals, helpers, and harmers. These are AVATARS that are radically for or against the relationship.
• SOCIETY and WAR stories require one central AVATAR , the protagonist, with offshoots of other AVATARS that embody the characteristics of the protagonist. 
• PERFORMANCE stories require a strong mentor figure.
• STATUS stories require a strong mentor figure, shapeshifters, and a herald or threshold guardian.
• MORALITY stories feature a protagonist that is despicable at the beginning of the story and a spiritual mentor or sidekick.
• WORLDVIEW stories require a mentor figure and shapeshifters.

Examples of Avatars in Genre Conventions

• In Treasure Island , an ACTION story, Jim Hawkins is the protagonist-hero, but through most of the book, he and the innocent crew members fulfill the agency-deprived role of victim. The main villain or shadow agent is Long John Silver, who is also a charming shapeshifter and threshold guardian. Dr. Livesey serves as mentor to Jim, and Ben Gunn is a marooned sailor and threshold guardian.
• In Murder on the Orient Express , a CRIME story, Poirot is the protagonist and master detective. To some extent, almost all the other passengers on the train participate in the murder and cover-up, so they are antagonists and shapeshifters, but they seek to restore justice for the victim, Daisy Armstrong, denied by Ratchett and a broken system, the primary villains. 
• In Pride and Prejudice , a LOVE story, Elizabeth and Darcy are lovers. George Wickham and Anne de Bourgh are rivals. Lady Catherine de Bourgh is a harmer who wants to keep the lovers apart. Georgiana Darcy and Elizabeth’s aunt and uncle serve as helpers, bringing the lovers together.

Catalysts are story elements that force the protagonist to change their tactics to reach their goal. Catalysts can take the form of an AVATAR or an element of the global context.

From the outside, catalysts exert pressure on the protagonist that mimics a kind of push and pull movement. They can’t solve the external problem easily, and they can’t simply quit and go home. This heightened personal or extrapersonal conflict requires the protagonist to stay in the ring long enough to confront their inner conflict about the problem raised by the inciting incident.

• In ACTION stories, the catalysts are a speech in praise of the villain, the deadline, set-piece sequences, and fast paced and exciting plots.
• WAR stories have a point of no return and a sacrifice of the protagonist for kinship moment as catalysts.
• HORROR stories use a sadomasochistic flip-flop where the reader can experience the power of the monster while sympathizing with the villain as the story’s catalyst.
• CRIME , THRILLER , and WESTERN/EASTERN stories require the antagonist’s MacGuffin, red herrings, a clock. the antagonist making the crime personal for the protagonist, and other subgenre specific catalysts.
• LOVE stories feature opposing forces, secrets, and rituals as the catalysts for the story.
• SOCIETY stories have a revolutionary point of no return, a moment where the vanquished are doomed to exile, and an ironic win-but-lose or lose-but-win ending.
• PERFORMANCE stories feature training where the protagonist hones their craft, a moment when the mentor regains their moral compass or betrays the protagonist, and a win-but-lose or lose-but-win ending.
• MORALITY stories include ghosts from the protagonist’s past that come to torment them and aid from unexpected sources that act as catalysts throughout the story.
• STATUS and WORLDVIEW stories feature a point of no return moment and a win-but-lose or lose-but-win ending.

Examples of Catalysts in Genre Conventions

• In Treasure Island , an ACTION story, Long John Silver delivers the speech in praise of the villain. Jim learns that Silver wants the treasure for financial security and that the pirate risks hanging if caught by the English authorities, so he’s planning to kill the honest members of the crew. 
• In Murder on the Orient Express , a CRIME story, Poirot must sort through the conflicting clues to solve the crime before the train reaches the station, giving the murderer time to escape (deadline). Poirot discovers twelve stab wounds inflicted by different people, a red herring meant to mislead investigators. 
• In Pride and Prejudice , a LOVE story, Elizabeth doesn’t tell Darcy when her feelings toward him change, and Darcy keeps his proof of love secret, even after they reconnect. They keep these secrets until they can each confront their own personal secrets. They must confront the truth about themselves if they are going to have any chance of commitment. 

Additional Resources for Genre Conventions:

• Conventions and Obligatory Moments: The Must-Haves To Meet Audience Expectations by Kimberly Kessler and Leslie Watts (Portions of this article have been taken from this book.)
• Four Core Framework: Needs, Life Values, Emotions, and Events in Storytelling by Shawn Coyne

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• Teacher Tips

Introducing and Teaching the Biography Genre

Listen to the full episode to hear how to teach the biography genre:.

We’ve made it through January! The first month of 2022 is already over, I can’t believe it!  As we enter the month of February it is time that we discuss and celebrate what Black History Month really stands for with our students. My favorite way to do this is by acknowledging iconic Black and African American figures. 

This is truly a great opportunity to teach biography and I have so many creative ways to do this that I’m going to share with you today. In this episode I will share how to teach this nonfiction genre so your students get the most out of their reading experience. 

We all know that biographies are nonfiction texts that describe a person’s life, achievements, and impact they’ve had on their community or even the world. This may appear interesting to us as adults, but it is very likely that your student’s may actually find this genre to be quite boring. This is why it is so important to have interactive and exciting lessons when first introducing this genre. There are so many ways you can do this and it is so important to integrate creativity and movement in the process. 

Let’s not forget that knowing your students is the best way to make teaching biographies fun. It will be beneficial for you to get an inventory of their interests and hobbies so you can choose mentor texts accordingly. This will hook your students and ultimately spark their curiosity and hold their attention. 

It will also help your students relate to the person since they’ll be familiar with the vocabulary. Biographies have the ability to be interesting and engaging, and by using these tips and strategies you will have your students undivided attention.

In this episode on how to teach the biography genre, I share:

• Simple ways to help your students understand how biographies work
• Ways to use mentor texts when teaching your students biographies
• How to identify biographies from a big group of texts 
• Tips for recognizing the main purpose of the genre
• My favorite techniques to let students share their ideas with others

Related Resources:

• Free Biography Templates
• Easy Reader Biographies
• Black History Biography Activity Bundle

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Your host, Megan Polk, is the creator and owner behind The Literacy Dive and loves to support students and their teachers with curriculum, literacy instruction, best practices, and engaging literacy activities.

Dive in with us every Monday for a new episode from Megan! She, and her guests, will chat about various literacy topics and will bring you tips and tricks that can easily be implemented in your classrooms. You can tune in wherever you get your podcasts! Listen to The Literacy Dive Podcast on platforms like Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Google, and more! If you find value from listening to this podcast, please rate this show, leave a review, and follow!

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18.3 Glance at Genre: Genre, Audience, Purpose, Organization

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Identify key genre conventions, including structure, tone, and mechanics.
• Implement common formats and design features for different text types.
• Demonstrate how genre conventions vary and are shaped by purpose, culture, and expectation.

The multimodal genres of writing are based on the idea that modes work in different ways, with different outcomes, to create various vehicles for communication. By layering, or combining, modes, an author can make meaning and communicate through mixed modes what a single mode cannot on its own. Essentially, modes “cooperate” to communicate the author’s intent as they interweave meanings captured by each.

For example, think of a public service announcement about environmental conservation. A composer can create a linguistic text about the dangers of plastic pollution in oceans and support the ideas with knowledge of or expertise in the subject. Yet words alone may not communicate the message forcefully, particularly if the audience consists of people who have never considered the impact of pollution on the oceans. That composer, then, might combine the text with images of massive amounts of human-generated plastic waste littering a shoreline, thus strengthening the argument and enhancing meaning by touching on audience emotions. By using images to convey some of the message, the composer layers modes. The picture alone does not tell the whole story, but when combined with informational text, it enhances the viewer’s understanding of the issue. Modes, therefore, can be combined in various ways to communicate a rhetorical idea effectively.

Audience Awareness

As with any type of composition, knowing your audience (the readers and viewers for whom you are creating) will help you determine what information to include and what genre, mode(s), or media in which to present it. Consider your audience when choosing a composition’s tone (composer’s attitude toward the audience or subject), substance, and language. Considering the audience is critical not only in traditional academic writing but also in nearly any genre or mode you choose. Ask yourself these questions when analyzing your audience’s awareness:

• What (and how much) does the audience already know about the topic? The amount of background information needed can influence what genre, modes, and media types you include and how you use them. You don’t want to bore an audience with information that is common knowledge or overwhelm an audience with information they know nothing about.
• What is the audience’s viewpoint on the subject? Are you creating for a skeptical audience or one that largely agrees with your rhetorical arguments?
• How do you relate to your audience? Do you share cultural understanding, or are you presenting information or beliefs that will be unfamiliar? This information will help you shape the message, tone, and structure of the composition.

Understanding your audience allows you to choose rhetorical devices that reflect ethos (appeals to ethics: credibility), logos (appeals to logic: reason), and pathos (appeals to sympathy: emotion) to create contextually responsive compositions through multiple modes.

It important to address audience diversity in all types of composition, but the unique aspects of multimodal composition present particular opportunities and challenges. First, when you compose, you do so through your own cultural filter, formed from your experiences, gender, education, and other factors. Multimodal composition opens up the ability to develop your cultural filter through various methods. Think about images of your lived experiences, videos capturing cultural events, or even gestures in live performances. Also consider the diversity of your audience members and how that affects the content choices you make during composition. Avoiding ethnocentrism —the assumption that the customs, values, and beliefs of your culture are superior to others—is an important consideration when addressing your audience, as is using bias-free language, especially regarding ethnicity, gender, and abilities.

Blogs, Vlogs, and Creative Compositions

Among the modes available to you as a composer, blogs (regularly updated websites, usually run by an individual or a small group) have emerged as a significant genre in digital literature. The term blog , a combination of web and log , was coined in 1999 and gained rapid popularity in the early 2000s. In general, blogs have a relatively narrow focus on a topic or argument and present a distinctive structure that includes these features:

• A headline or title draws in potential readers. Headlines are meant to grab attention, be short, and accurately reflect the content of the blog post.
• An introduction hooks the reader, briefly introducing the topic and establishing the author’s credibility on the subject.
• Short paragraphs often are broken up by images, videos, or other media to make meaning and supplement or support the text content.
• The narrative is often composed in a style in which the author claims or demonstrates expertise.
• Media such as images, video, and infographics depict information graphically and break up text.
• Hyperlinks (links to other internet locations) to related content often serve as evidence supporting the author’s claim.
• A call to action provides clear and actionable instructions that engage the reader.

Blogs offer accessibility and an opportunity to make meaning in new ways. By integrating images and audiovisual media, you can develop a multimodal representation of arguments and ideas. Blogs also provide an outlet for conveying ideas through both personal and formal narratives and are used frequently in industries from entertainment to scientific research to government organizations.

Newer in the family of multimodal composition is the video blog, or vlog , a blog for which the medium is video. Vlogs usually combine video embedded in a website with supporting text, images, or other modes of communication. Vlogging often takes on a narrative structure, similar to other types of storytelling, with the added element of supplementary audio and video, including digital transitions that connect one idea or scene to another. Vlogs offer ample opportunities to mix modalities.

Vlogs give a literal voice to a composer, who typically narrates or speaks directly to the camera. Like a blogger, a vlog creator acts as an expert, telling a narrative story or using rhetoric to argue a point. Vlogs often strive to create an authentic and informal tone, similar to published blogs, inviting a stream-of-consciousness or interview-like style. Therefore, they often work well when targeted toward audiences for whom a casual mood is valuable and easily understood.

Other creative compositions include websites, digital or print newsletters, podcasts, and a wide variety of other content. Each composition type has its own best practices regarding structure and organization, often depending on the chosen modalities, the way they are used, and the intended audience. Whatever the mode, however, all multimodal writing has several characteristics in common, beginning with effective, intentional composition.

Effective Writing

Experimenting with modes and media is not an excuse for poorly developed writing that lacks focus, organization, thought, purpose, or attention to mechanics. Although multimodal compositions offer flexibility of expression, the content still must be presented in well-crafted, organized, and purposeful ways that reflect the author’s purpose and the audience’s needs.

• To be well-crafted, a composition should reflect the author’s use of literary devices to convey meaning, use of relevant connections, and acknowledgment of grammar and writing conventions.
• To be organized, a composition should reflect the author’s use of effective transitions and a logical structure appropriate to the chosen mode.
• To be purposeful, a composition should show that the author addresses the needs of the audience, uses rhetorical devices that advance the argument, and offers insightful understanding of the topic.

Organization of multimodal compositions refers to the sequence of message elements. You must decide which ideas require attention, how much and in what order, and which modalities create maximum impact on readers. While many types of formal and academic writing follow a prescribed format, or at least the general outline of one, the exciting and sometimes overwhelming features of multimodal possibilities open the door to any number of acceptable formats. Some of these are prescribed, and others more open ended; your job will inevitably be to determine when to follow a template and when to create something new. As the composer, you seek to structure media in ways that will enable the reader, or audience, to derive meaning. Even small changes in media, rhetorical appeal, and organization can alter the ways in which the audience participates in the construction of meaning.

Within a medium—for example, a video—you might include images, audio, and text. By shifting the organization, placement, and interaction among the modes, you change the structure of the video and therefore create varieties of meaning. Now, imagine you use that same structure of images, audio, and text, but change the medium to a slideshow. The impact on the audience will likely change with the change in medium. Consider the infamous opening scene of the horror movie The Shining (1980). The primary medium, video, shows a car driving through a mountainous region. After audio is added, however, the meaning of the multimodal composition changes, creating an emphasis on pace—management of dead air—and tone—attitude toward the subject—that communicates something new to the audience.

Exploring the Genre

These are the key terms and characteristics of multimodal texts.

• Alignment: the way in which elements such as text features, images, and particularly text are placed on a page. Text can be aligned at the left, center, or right. Alignment contributes to organization and how media transitions within a text.
• Audience: readers or viewers of the composition.
• Channel: a medium used to communicate a message. Often-used channels include websites, blogs, social media, print, audio, and video-hosting sites.
• Complementary: describes content that is different across two or more modes, both of which are necessary for understanding. Often audio and visual modes are complementary, with one making the other more meaningful.
• Emphasis: the elements in media that are most significant or pronounced. The emphasis choices have a major impact on the overall meaning of the text.
• Focus: a clear purpose for composition, also called the central idea, main point, or guiding principle. Focus should include the specific audience the composer is trying to influence.
• Layering: combining modes in a single composition.
• Layout: the organization of elements on a page, including text, images, shapes, and overall composition. Layout applies primarily to the visual mode.
• Media: the means and channels of reaching an audience (for example, image, website, song). A medium (singular form of media ) can contain multiple modes.
• Mode: the method of communication (linguistic, visual, audio, or spatial means of creating meaning). Media can incorporate more than one mode.
• Organization: the pattern of arrangement that allows a reader to understand text or images in a composition. Organization may be textual, visual, or spatial.
• Proximity: the relationship between objects in space, specifically how close to or far from one another they are. Proximity can show a relationship between elements and is often important in layout.
• Purpose: an author’s reason for writing a text, including the reasoning that accounts for which modes of presentation to use. Composers of multimodal texts may seek to persuade, inform, or entertain the audience.
• Repetition: a unifying feature, such as a pattern used more than once, in the way in which elements (text features, typeface, color, etc.) are used on a page. Repetition often indicates emphasis or a particular theme. Repetitions and patterns can help focus a composition, explore a theme, and emphasize important points.
• Supplementary: describes content that is different in two or more modes, where a composer uses one mode to convey primary understanding and the other(s) to support or extend understanding. Supplementary content should not be thought of as “extra,” for its purpose is to expand on the primary media.
• Text: written words. In multimodal composition, text can refer to a piece of communication as a whole, incorporating written words, images, sounds, and movement.
• Tone: the composer’s attitude toward the subject and/or the audience.
• Transitions: words, phrases, or audiovisual elements that help readers make connections between ideas in a multimodal text, including connections from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, and mode to mode. Transitions show relationships between ideas and help effectively organize a composition.

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Film Genres

• Introduction
• Streaming services
• Action films
• Amateur films
• Stop-motion animation
• Biographical films
• Blaxploitation films
• Children's films
• Gangster films
• Detective & mystery films
• Documentary films
• Ethnographic films
• Experimental films
• Exploitation films
• Historical films
• Slasher films
• Independent films
• Indigenous films
• James Bond films
• Mockumentary films
• Newsreels This link opens in a new window
• Police films
• Bible films
• Star Trek films
• Star Wars films
• Science films
• Shakespeare on film
• Short films
• Silent films
• Sports films
• Superhero films
• Anti-war films
• Vampire films
• Zombie films

Film Studies Librarian

Other library resource(s)

Internet resource(s)

Keeping up with the journal literature

You can get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Don't own or use a mobile device? You can still use BrowZine! It's now available in a web version. You can get to it here . The web version works the same way as the app version. Find the journals you like, create a custom Bookshelf, get ToCs and read the articles you want.

A quick definition for biographical films

Biopic (biographical picture; biographical film)

A film that tells the story of the life of a real person, often a well-known monarch, political leader, or artist. Thomas Edison’s Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (US, 1895) prefigures the genre but perhaps the earliest biopic is Jeanne d’Arc/Joan of Arc (Georges Méliès, France, 1900). Biopics were popular with audiences in Europe in the early 20th century, including Queen Elizabeth (Henri Desfontaine and Louis Mercanto, France, 1912), Danton (Dimitri Buchowetski, Germany, 1920), Anne Boleyn (Ernst Lubitsch, Germany, 1920), Napoleon (Abel Gance, France, 1927), and The Private Life of Henry VIII (Alexander Korda, UK, 1933). Beyond Europe and North America, biopics celebrated anti-colonial figures and continue to do so ( see Philippines, film in ). The biopic was a staple of US cinema during the studio period, with some 300 films released between 1927 and 1960. The work of director William Dieterle, including The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), Juarez (1939), and The Life of Emile Zola (1937), is particularly worthy of note. It is common for films from this era to start in media res and proceed by way of flashbacks through a ‘stages of life’ structure, with details from a person’s early life often prefiguring the events they subsequently became known for ( see plot/story ). This structure allows the biopic to move between public and private knowledge pertaining to the film’s subject: the revelation of a private self is one of the genre’s key pleasures. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), generally agreed to be one of the greatest films ever made, is a scathing and thinly disguised biopic of newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst. US versions of the genre display a shift from celebratory studio-era films to a ‘warts and all’ approach in the late 1960s and 1970s; as, for example, in the Woody Guthrie biopic, Bound For Glory (Hal Ashby, US, 1976). From the 1990s, a number of films, such as 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (François Girard, Portugal/Canada/Finland/Netherlands, 1993) and the Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, US, 2007), actively sought to deconstruct the genre. The lives of entertainers, film stars, and artists comprise some 36 per cent of all Hollywood biopics, a tendency that continues in the contemporary cinema with films showing the rise to fame of Freddie Mercury ( Bohemian Rhapsody (Bryan Singer, 2018)) and Elton John ( Rocketman (Dexter Fletcher, 2019)).  ...

Kuhn, A., & Westwell, G. (2020).  Biopic . In  A Dictionary of Film Studies . Oxford University Press. Retrieved 19 May. 2023

Finding library resources for biographical films

The Jones Media Center has a collection of biographies for viewing. To find them, you can do a subject search for " biographical films ." To find books about biographical films, look at the subject headings that contain " history and criticism ." These books will discuss historical films in general or those produced in different countries. To find film resources on a specific person, you can do a subject search and add " drama " with your other search terms.

• biographical films Call number range PN 1995.9 .B55 on Baker Level 4 .
• biographical films [ ... insert name of country ... ]
• autobiographical films

Introductory reading(s)

Selected book title(s)

Finding scholarly articles & journal titles

Articles and other writings about movies can be found in many publications. We don't have any periodicals that look exclusively at biographies in our collections. You can use Film & Television Literature Index to find articles. You can also search in America, History & Life or Historical Abstracts depending on which historical figure you want to research.

Selected list of biographical films

Find more biographical films in the online catalog .

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What are genre conventions and why should you use them? Find out today

It’s important to know what your readers want. To find out, pay attention to your genres conventions. But what are genre conventions? You may know the name of the genre you’ve chosen to write in, you may have even written a story or two. Or ten. But do you know why bookworms choose those types of stories repeatedly? It’s time to find out by going beneath the surface. This article will teach you what genre conventions are, why you should use them, and how they can help you write a book that sells.

What are genre conventions?

A genre is a category of literary composition. It’s classified according to the content, style, or form of the text. When you sit to write a book, you make several choices. These include your genre, point of view, theme, and more. There are several genres and subgenres to choose from and you’ve likely already chosen the one you want to write within. And, as you know, each genre is different. What makes each genre different is the conventions used within them.

Genre conventions are a set of standards or expectations that exist in a given genre. They often tell the reader what to expect in terms of character archetypes, plots, and settings. They are the shared, agreed-upon rules of what you can expect to happen in a novel of that genre.

Genre conventions can create a sense of familiarity for readers. It also creates an expectation for the reader so that you don’t have to spend time describing things they already know.

The rules of each genre are different, even though they may have similarities to another genre. For example, romance novels often have happy endings, love triangles, and internal conflict. But, any genre can have romance within it while also following its own conventions.

To make this easy, think of conventions as puzzle pieces. A mystery puzzle will have different pieces than a science fiction puzzle would.

Where do they come from?

A genre convention refers to the standard set of stylistic and thematic expectations that readers have for a given type of literature. Therefore, genre conventions come from the readers. Or do they? Upon further thought, I’d say these conventions originate from authors like you. Stories have been around for a long time. Through that time, writers have created genres, and put certain elements into those genres over and over again. Readers then pick up those books and have continued to do so. It’s like a trend that sticks.

The caveat to this is that stereotypes and clichés are born from conventions that are overused. It would be a good idea for you to figure out what those are within your genre. For example, a fantasy genre convention is having a magic system, but a cliché is the main character being the chosen one.

Why are genre conventions important?

Let’s say you’re standing in front of a coffee shop and a juice or smoothie cafe. Depending on who you are, you will gravitate to one shop over the other, and your expectations will be different. When you go into a coffee shop, you expect certain smells, a cozy atmosphere, and yummy treats that…may not be so healthy. But when you walk into a juice or smoothie cafe, the atmosphere differs from the coffee shop, and you’re more likely to get healthier food options.

Genre conventions are exactly that for bookworms. For readers and writers, genre conventions provide some sense of comfort, familiarity, and even community. When readers encounter a story that does not follow the genre’s conventions, they might feel as though the story is at odds with what they expect from that genre. It’s okay to go outside the norms, but if you step too far away, you risk misleading your readers.

What’s the difference between a genre convention and a trope?

Genre conventions and genre tropes are often used interchangeably. However, there is a slight difference between the two. While a genre convention is an element that helps to distinguish or identify a particular genre, a trope is a portrayal of that convention.

For example, a convention would be superheros, but a trope would be superheros wearing capes. Not all superheros have to wear capes, yet it is common. Another example of a convention is star-crossed lovers, but a trope would be that the lovers are from different socioeconomic statuses. Again, you want to be careful with this because if the trope is used too much, it borders on the line of stereotypical or cliché. Make this your own by coming up with different ways to portray those conventions within your genre.

Examples by genre. I’m here.

There are several genres and even more genre conventions, but I’ve taken a few of the more popular ones and came up with a list of some genre conventions to get you started:

When should genre conventions be used?

All the time. The key is not knowing when you should use them, but what ones you should use. Any conventions related to settings, characterization, and writing style will be placed throughout your story. Conventions related to your narrative structure (i.e. your plot) will have a time and place within your story. However, this is easy to figure out once you know what those conventions are.

FAQ about genre conventions.

Yes. Even if you aren’t doing it on purpose, you most likely have incorporated genre conventions into your story. But if you know what genre conventions are, you can utilize that knowledge to stretch your story beyond your imagination. You can try new conventions that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. You can also create your own conventions that could be seen as the norm in the future.

No. In fact, that would be a mistake. Shoving in as many genre conventions and tropes as you possibly can would be overwhelming to your readers, unoriginal, and take away opportunities for you to be creative. When you choose too many, it makes your book formulaic, and leads to information overload. Instead, I recommend picking either your favorite conventions, or the ones you want to explore as a writer.

Creativity. Conventions come about because previous authors had an idea and liked it. Other writers either had that idea too or saw it, liked it, and used it in their own stories. Finally, readers enjoyed it. The other reason new conventions come about is because times change. For example, the LGBTQ genre has been around for less than a century. Because of this, so have the conventions within it. I wouldn’t worry too much about coming up with something entirely new. If you have an idea that hasn’t been explored, go for it. Otherwise, focus on making current conventions unique within your story.

How do you discover the conventions of your chosen genre?

In a word, research. Google is your best friend. But if you really want to know how to determine what your genres conventions are and how to know which ones should go in your novel, get the free checklist below:

Start thinking about what your genres conventions are so you can write better stories that your readers will love

Stories have been around for a long time. But as time goes on, new genres and genre conventions pop up. Genre conventions are the elements that make up a genre. It’s important to know what your readers want, so take the time to get to know what your genres conventions are. To make it easy, grab the free checklist I created, walking you through how to do just that.

The Purple Shelf Club is a community where self-publishing fiction authors and bibliophiles can combine their love of literature and travel. Alexis; founder of the Purple Shelf Club, loves disappearing inside of a good book, just like Bastian in The Neverending Story .

With the goal of having a home library and seeing the world, Alexis creates eBooks for fiction authors, so they can write better stories, printable bookmarks for bibliophiles to enjoy those stories, and literary tour guides so both can experience books in a whole new way.

When not helping wanderlust bibliophiles and fiction writers, Alexis masters the art of an undomesticated domestic partner. Obsessed with all things 1890s and 1940s, she is a self-proclaimed nerd who loves pampering her man at home while also chasing one of her many ambitions; becoming a research scientist in neuroscience.

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Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction: Introduction

• Open Access
• First Online: 16 December 2022

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• Julia Novak 5 &
• Caitríona Ní Dhúill 6  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing ((PSLW))

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• The original version of this chapter was revised: this chapter was previously published non-open access. It has been changed to Open Access. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_15

The introduction situates the question of gender in biographical fiction in relation to current scholarship on biofiction, life writing, and historical fiction, and establishes a dialogue between biofiction studies and gender-sensitive approaches to both life writing and historical fiction. Clarifying the often complex and contradictory understandings of key terms that have emerged in recent scholarship on biofiction, historical fiction, life writing, and their inter-relationships, the introduction discusses the ethics of biofiction and the notion of biographical authenticity; the persistence of conventional tropes of femininity, masculinity, and gender normativity in biofiction; the aesthetics of agency in post-Lukácsian biofiction and historical fiction; and the role of creativity in imagining feminist, queer, and non-binary pasts.

The introduction then outlines the volume’s individual chapters and the common themes or approaches that connect them, including gender and power relations in the re-imagined lives; critique or reinscription of patriarchal values and mindsets; cliché and generic convention; revision and reinvention; ventriloquism and visibility; uses of historical research, evidence, sources, and their traces in the biofictional text; narratological aspects; and questions of readership and reception.

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• Historical fiction
• Metabiography
• Feminist criticism
• Life writing

Biographical fiction—or biofiction, as we will mostly call it in this book—has become an immensely popular genre in recent decades. It allows readers to dive into remote periods and places, to immerse themselves in a historical character and imagine what it may have been like to lead the “Cultural Revolution” in Maoist China, or to undergo gender reassignment surgery in early twentieth-century Germany, or to marry King Henry VIII in Tudor England, all while enjoying the evocative imagery, textual playfulness, suspense, and insider’s view that fiction provides. Using the factual outlines of historical lives as springboards for their own imaginative narratives, biofictions boldly go where no biography has gone before. Such metaphors of courageous (space) exploration are problematic, of course, not least as they suggest that life stories are “new worlds” just waiting to be “found” by writers. Even with regard to factual biography, the paradigm of discovery has long been troubled by the realisation that life narratives are ideological constructs, more or less carefully crafted for consumption by specific audiences for specific purposes and with reference to existing conventions of genre. Evoking authors’ “boldness” is useful, however, as a way to consider the creative licence of biofiction to stray from the biographical facts—by inventing encounters and dialogues, by writing about the subject’s thoughts and secret motives, or even by inserting fictional characters in their texts, in which such elements mingle with recorded history. It is exactly this narrative privilege that accounts for the fascination the genre exerts on its readers, and it is this privilege that critics periodically use as grounds for invalidating biofiction. Footnote 1

While paying close attention to the productive tensions the genre creates between biographical fact and authorial licence, this volume reads biofiction as a discourse on gender. Following Judith Butler’s understanding of gender as “a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint,” Footnote 2 we inquire into biofiction’s improvisations within the constraints of both gender and genre. If, rather than to represent a life faithfully or accurately, the aim of biofiction is creatively to “answer perplexing questions, fill in cultural lacunae, or signify human interiors,” as Michael Lackey posits, Footnote 3 gender often constitutes a central axis of its imaginative inquiry into past lives.

Biography, History, Fiction: Stories of Gender and Limits of Genre

Before we outline what sort of genre we have in mind when we speak of biographical fiction, however, we need to briefly clarify what we mean by genre. Genre is not a kind of box into which a literary text can unambiguously and exclusively be placed. We follow Jacques Derrida’s approach to genre as defined by “the law of abounding, of excess , the law of participation without membership, of contamination.” Footnote 4 The Derridean concept of genre can be related to Butler’s notion of gender performativity: just as reiterations of gender also open up a space—in the very moment of repetition—for the subversion of normative patterns, so too is contamination an inevitable feature of literary genres, as each new individual text will never be an exact copy of previous specimens. Embracing a dynamic concept of genre does not mean that we insist on postmodern notions of “fluidity” to declare the idea of genre as void of all meaning or heuristic value. Rather, we take the view that genre as process—as historically conditioned and continuously evolving mode of writing and reading—requires greater specificity and nuance than any “grand theory” of a genre would allow. This process-oriented view of genre suggests a critical engagement that is attentive to the features of a text and its relation to other (bodies of) texts.

We follow a definition of biofiction as literature based on the life of an historical person, using that person’s name, Footnote 5 but approaching its subject through overtly fictional means that include varying degrees of invention. Footnote 6 As such, biofiction “takes a real person and their real history as the subject matter for imaginative exploration,” as David Lodge states, by means other than “the objective, evidence-based discourse of biography.” Footnote 7 Lodge’s statement evokes two obvious reference points for the genre of biofiction: the “imaginative exploration” of “real history” associates biofiction with historical fiction, while the move to distinguish biographical fiction from biography reminds us of the proximity of these genres. In the following, we will discuss biofiction’s relation to historical fiction and biography, and point to some ways in which gender-sensitive criticism of these latter two genres can be productively directed towards biofiction.

The historical novel, according to Jerome de Groot’s broad definition, is “set in the past” and comprises a wide spectrum of forms, including “genre-specific work from detective to horror to romance” and a large segment of “literary fiction” Footnote 8 extending also to self-reflexive narratives that “attack historiographical convention.” Footnote 9 While some critics consider biographical and historical fiction to be distinct or even opposed forms, Footnote 10 we argue that the broad scope of historical fiction outlined by de Groot can also accommodate biographical fiction.

Some recent work on biofiction has indeed been carried out within the framework of historical fiction criticism. Footnote 11 Several contributions to this volume also discuss biofiction as a form of historical fiction, and it is easy to see why. Biofiction is concerned with historical lives. Its engagement with history becomes especially clear once one moves away from a view of History as a series of momentous events and inventions, towards a multileveled concept of history informed also by more recent currents of historiography, such as social history and microhistory.

De Groot describes the characters of historical fiction as “identifiable to us on the one hand due to the conceit of the novel form, in that they speak the same language, and their concerns are often similar to ours, but their situation and their surroundings are immensely different.” Footnote 12 This also holds true for biofictional characters. Biographical fiction oscillates between two temporal levels, the time of writing and the time in which it is set, creating that “sense of historicized ‘difference’” Footnote 13 that de Groot considers definitive of historical fiction and which is the foundation of its dynamic of identification and distance. Reflecting on her queer nineteenth-century protagonist Jenny Bonnet in Frog Music (2014), novelist Emma Donoghue describes this mediation between past and present as follows: “I am trying to make two periods resonate through this person. It’s almost like the character I’m focusing on is a time traveler.” Footnote 14 Bonnet’s “delightfully self-destructive” behaviour made the author reach for an ADHD diagnosis, for instance. Footnote 15 Donoghue notes, “So I’m making her a figure of our era in all those small ways to try and make sense of the historical record of how she behaved.” Footnote 16 While Donoghue is indeed interested in shedding light on “history” for her readers and wants to “make sense of the historical record,” she does this by projecting present-day concepts and concerns onto her protagonist so as to render her relatable for present-day readers.

Conceding to biographical fiction a place in the vast domain of historical fiction allows us to read biofictions in the light of critical work on historical fiction and gender. The genre of the historical romance novel, for instance, has given rise to insightful studies of its gender dynamics and politics, and these can also help to illuminate the cultural work of biofictional texts. Diane Haeger’s biographical novel The Perfect Royal Mistress (2007) about Nell Gwyn will serve as an example here. While Gwyn’s story may in some ways be inherently suited to the conventions of the classic, heteronormative version of the historical romance novel—offering, for instance, an attractive, empowered young woman, Footnote 17 an aristocratic milieu, Footnote 18 and a powerful “man of the world” hero Footnote 19 in the figure of King Charles II—Haeger’s plot and cast draw on romance conventions rather more emphatically than the subject’s biography would seem to allow. The Perfect Royal Mistress opens with sixteen-year-old Nell as a virgin—a scenario that is historically unlikely, as Gwyn probably worked as a child prostitute, Footnote 20 but which chimes well with historical romance’s penchant for inexperienced heroines, as diagnosed by Helen Hughes. Footnote 21 The young heroine’s first encounter with the king, on page 4, already foreshadows her impending love affair with Charles, as “her knees were suddenly weak” in his presence, Footnote 22 but the lovers’ union is then predictably delayed. In a manner typical of romantic fiction, the novel is oriented towards this central love relationship, and organises Nell’s life narrative around it. The figure of Charles is endowed with the generic traits of the romance hero, “saturnine and abrasive,” Footnote 23 and the novel also features those descriptions of “wild explicit sex” that have become a staple of the historical romance novel. Footnote 24

It is most interesting to see, then, how the novel struggles to accommodate the fact that the historical Nell-Charles relationship departs from one of historical romance’s most salient structural premises: the “Happily Ever After” ending of a lasting, monogamous love relationship that is “the promise of the genre writer to his or her reader,” as Kristin Ramsdell states. Footnote 25 In historical romance criticism, this is often referred to as the “winning and taming” Footnote 26 of the hero by the heroine. Romance writers such as Ann Maxwell and Jayne Krentz describe this in rather more colourful and heteronormative terms when they declare romance novels to be “tales of strong women taming and gentling that most dangerous of creatures on earth, the human male.” Footnote 27 Gwyn’s actual biography does not offer a romantically satisfying conclusion of this kind, as Charles never married her, nor was Gwyn the only mistress of the “Merry Monarch”—an inconvenience that the novel makes every effort to smooth over as it follows Gwyn’s life up to Charles’s death, by insisting in various ways that their love was the only meaningful relationship for them both. The Perfect Royal Mistress ends on a protestation of romantic fulfilment: “She may not have been the queen, nor even his only mistress—far from that—but she knew with every fiber of her being, and so did their son, that she had been his only love.” Footnote 28

Haeger’s novel demonstrates not only that biofiction can accommodate elements from other genres and subgenres, but also that these may sometimes rub up against each other. Rather than speak of generic blending in such cases, a model of generic layering suggests itself, where elements of different genre conventions—in this case, historical romance and biography—accrue but do not quite merge into a homogeneous whole. It is precisely the fault lines between them that make the gender politics of Haeger’s biofiction most apparent. Footnote 29 While the historical Gwyn was one of the first women on the English Restoration stage and one of the most celebrated comediennes of her day—an achievement that biographies tend to trace expertly and at length Footnote 30 —the novel’s emphasis on romance leads to a view of her stage career primarily as preparation for her liaison with the king and her life at court, as in a scene when Nell is about to meet Charles and her rival Louise de Kéroualle at the theatre: “She stood, glanced at her own reflection, forced an even more carefree smile, then prepared to receive him. Perhaps he believed she did not know about Carwell’s presence. That was how she intended to proceed. ‘ You are an actress, now act! ’” Footnote 31 Haeger’s romance-centred narrative trajectory perpetuates the long-standing image of Nell Gwyn as “royal mistress,” attributing significance to Gwyn’s life and career only in relation to the king.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that feminist or Marxist critics tend to assess historical romance rather critically. For them, the genre’s iterable plot structure signals its allegiance to patriarchy, as the heroine exchanges independence for romantic love, Footnote 32 thereby affirming “the foundational premise of hetero-normative masculinist culture,” as Catherine Roach puts it. Footnote 33 The absence of a convincing “Happily Ever After” conclusion in The Perfect Royal Mistress inadvertently serves to highlight Gwyn’s precarious dependence and need to maintain the king’s erotic interest in her even more, and the novel’s embrace of historical romance conventions forecloses the telling of Gwyn’s life in a way that could bring alternative aspects of her life and character to the fore.

Just as historical fiction studies can help shed light on the gender dynamics of biographical fictions, it is worth examining critical work on life writing in order to establish how insights of this scholarship, too, may be applicable to biofiction. For this purpose, it bears to once more consider the relation between biography and biofiction—to understand what makes biofiction “biographical.” Biography, according to Hermione Lee’s definition, is “the story of a person told by someone else.” Footnote 34 “A person” here denotes, of course, a real, historical person. Although “life writing” has gained popularity in recent decades as a more capacious term that, while also referring to actual lives, includes biographical and autobiographical fiction, Footnote 35 the term “biography” evokes an expectation that “the story should be true” and the biographer “should tell us what actually happened in the life.” Footnote 36 Lee relativises this stipulation by pointing to experimental forms, gaps in the records, agendas of witnesses and biographers, and failures of memory, but the idea of the biographer’s “responsibility to the truth” Footnote 37 still holds as a general readerly expectation. The responsibility Lee evokes is not only to factual accuracy and verifiability, however, but also to the notion of character. For her, a central metaphor for biography is the portrait, which “suggests empathy, bringing to life, capturing the character,” as the biographer’s representation of the subject “will shape how posterity views them.” Footnote 38 This idea of the textual afterlife and its role in cultural memory is also evoked by John F. Keener, who discusses “biographical narrative” as a continuum that exceeds the bookends of birth and death dates to encompass the “cumulative, cultural life story” of the biographical subject Footnote 39 —which may also include their biofictional reincarnation.

While biofiction is clearly marked as fiction, its reference to an actual person—not least through its use of real names—initiates a way of reading that keeps both the writer’s creative invention and the narrative’s rootedness in a specific historical life in view. Many writers consider this biographical rootedness central to their work. Authors of biofiction “frequently subordinate empirical facts to a symbolic truth,” as Lackey notes. Footnote 40 This creation of a symbolic truth is often geared specifically towards being true to the character as the writer envisions it. Emma Donoghue, for instance, speaks of “an obligation” Footnote 41 and “ethical commitment” Footnote 42 to the historical figures she writes about to “get it right,” which makes her “go to a lot of trouble to write about them when you could just make them up.” Footnote 43 Like Donoghue, David Ebershoff evokes the notion of responsibility when explaining his choice to change Gerda Wegener’s name in The Danish Girl about Lili Elbe because of the fictional liberties he took with the life of Lili’s co-protagonist. Footnote 44 Ebershoff employed “the tools of fiction” in The Danish Girl because he believed in “fiction’s ability to mine a character’s inner life” as a way to “show a reader who Lili was, what she thought and felt, and what her life means.” Footnote 45 David Lodge similarly points to the affordances of biofiction in capturing a historical figure’s “interiority,” which for him is a declared goal: “If a novel is about a real person, it can use the clues that are available, the information that is available, to try and recreate what that person’s consciousness was perceiving in any given situation. So that’s the point of doing it.” Footnote 46 Underlining his concerns with being true to the subject’s life, he reveals a reluctance to “invent whole scenes” in his biofiction “if it can be avoided.” Footnote 47 Even novelist Jay Parini, who emphasises biographical fiction’s licence and creativity in engaging with historical figures and opines that a biofiction about Franklin Roosevelt can “let him fly air balloons over France for thirty years,” if the author so chooses, stipulates that the purpose of such inventiveness would be “a clarifying effect”—that is, to “get us closer to some aspect of the personality of F.D.R.” Footnote 48 If the notion of biography as portrait points to an artistically inflected, subjective kind of referentiality that nevertheless aims at “catching a likeness,” to use Lee’s phrase, Footnote 49 these writers suggest that biographical fiction has something distinctive and valuable to contribute to the biographical effort.

The transparency of an author’s engagement with biographical “raw material” also shapes readers’ expectations. Emma Donoghue, for instance, stresses the significance of back notes and that “readers really do care about facts.” Footnote 50 Biographical novelist Kevin Barry recounts how he made every effort in Beatlebone (2015), his novel about John Lennon, to “get the voice right,” because he “realized that a lot of readers were going to have an expectation, before they even got to page one, of what the character should sound like.” Footnote 51

This is not to say that biographical fiction and factual biography can simply be conflated—they clearly operate under different truth contracts. The promise of biography to its readers is, after all, that nothing will be made up, and that speculations, while permissible, will be marked as such. Also, the idea of “getting it right” or “catching a likeness” may be a chief concern for many writers of biofiction, but it is certainly not an obligation. Yet biofiction is, like biography, a form of life writing, and both gesture across time and space towards what Caitríona Ní Dhúill has called “biography’s absent presence” Footnote 52 : the once living body from which all biographical discourse ramifies. Gender-focused studies of life writing have long recognised that gendered bodies become subject to specific forms of narrative, and that such narratives, in turn, shape our views and expectations of gendered subjectivity. In what follows, we bring biofiction studies into dialogue with critical work on life writing and gender, illuminating biofiction’s creative dealings with gender—past and present—by relating the genre to other forms of life narrative.

Gender, Fame, and Agency in Biofiction

From the late twentieth century onwards, feminist biography scholars have pointed to the inherent gender bias of biography—a genre that celebrates lives unfolding in public fields of action to which women have historically had little access and that long neglected the substantial contributions of those women who were active in such fields. Feminist biographers set out to “restore” women “to the record,” as Sara Alpern points out, and to bring a new “gender consciousness” to a genre that was once a “men’s club.” Footnote 53 Fiction writers’ noticeable interest, particularly since the 1970s, in the lives of historical women can in part be understood as contributing to the feminist project of “reclaiming” neglected figures through biographical narrative. A novel that demonstrates this reclamatory potential of biofiction is Anna Banti’s Artemisia (1947) about Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, which even pre-dates the second-wave feminist turn towards women’s lives. As Lucia Boldrini notes, Banti’s text had a share in altering the often dismissive view that art history had taken of Gentileschi: it initiated the painter’s revaluation as “the woman who stood up to her rapist in court, who made a name for herself, who was able to establish a school in Naples and earn her living from her work.” Footnote 54

Stephanie Bird, in her study of novels about historical German women, draws an explicit connection between women’s biofiction and twentieth-century feminist movements, observing that “the authors are almost invariably interested in rectifying the injustice of women who, for whatever reason, have not been accorded a historical voice.” Footnote 55 Bird links these narratives to the feminist project of “herstory” that sought to uncover the blind spots of traditional historiography and to reevaluate as political the private and domestic spheres to which women had often been relegated. Footnote 56 While Bird highlights the value of herstorical biofiction in the context of late twentieth-century women’s movements, she also points to the risks that inhere in upholding the classic division of public/masculine and private/feminine that herstory often reflects, as it may yet again marginalise women “from ‘proper’ history.” Footnote 57 Her study is specifically concerned with what biographer and critic Jean Strouse has termed “semi-private lives,” stories of women such as Henriette Vogel and Cornelia Goethe who have entered public consciousness chiefly for their association with famous men. In feminist terms, the challenge of writing about such figures lies in according the female subject a story of her own. Too often, she is employed merely as a new lens through which to view an already famous man and is thus turned into one of biofiction’s “sousveillant” subjects—characters who “observe and narrate” a canonical figure “from below.” Such characters have become a generic staple of biographical fiction. Footnote 58

That “herstorical” biofiction is capable of maintaining a more consistent focus even on the life of a “semi-private” woman is evidenced by Maggie O’Farrell’s critically acclaimed Hamnet (2020)—which relegates a famous husband almost entirely to the background of the narrative. O’Farrell’s novel centres in the consciousness of the woman who was married to William Shakespeare. It effectively “plunges the reader into the vivid life of the house, with its smells of a glover’s workshop, the heat and bustle of a cookhouse, the physical effort of planting a garden or twisting out newly washed sheets,” as one reviewer admiringly remarks. Footnote 59 Anne or Agnes Hathaway’s sparsely documented and—in traditional biographical terms—unremarkable domestic life gives rise in Hamnet  to an eerily evocative narrative of loss, grief, and emotional survival. Footnote 60 Although the figure of William (who remains unnamed throughout) may well function to kindle readers’ interest and anchor the story in one of the “great lives” of world history, the novel remains centred on her story. Footnote 61

Recent decades have seen a notable surge in female-centred biofictions, reflected also in the contributions to this volume. When these are relational biofictions that centre on the heroine’s relationship with a (frequently famous) man, they often place masculinity under scrutiny no less than they interrogate female subjectivity. Thus, a biofiction like Judith Chernaik’s Mab’s Daughters: Shelley’s Wives and Lovers: Their Own Story (1991) does not just seek to reclaim female literary predecessors, as Beate Neumeier observes, but also to “deconstruct … the dominant male figures through the female perspective.” Footnote 62 And indeed, the variety of male subjectivities emerging from the biofictions studied across this book—from an inscrutable and bloody-minded Mao Zedong, to an elusive Henry James and various versions of Henry VIII—testifies to masculinity as provisional, multiple, performative, and related to fluid relations of power and varying degrees of cultural visibility. Footnote 63

For relational biofictions that do not clearly privilege one protagonist, Ina Bergmann suggests the term “double historical biofiction.” Footnote 64 In her contribution to this volume, Bergmann discusses novels about Frances Sargent Osgood and Edgar Allen Poe, and demonstrates how the gendered positions within even seemingly balanced character constellations merit close attention, particularly with regard to the two subjects’ unequal legacies and prominence in cultural memory.

Biofictional narratives featuring double or multiple protagonists help to trouble an all-too-easy alignment of the public/private dichotomy with gender binaries. A novel such as Margaret Forster’s Lady’s Maid (1990), about Elizabeth Barret Browning’s servant Elizabeth Wilson, is a case in point. For many years bound in service to a famous woman poet, Forster’s Wilson on one level becomes the linchpin for yet another retelling of the Brownings’ legendary elopement to Italy and the resounding success of Wilson’s mistress among (mostly male) literati. Thus oscillating in its focus, Forster’s novel could be said to illustrate through biofiction a problem that has long preoccupied gender-conscious scholars of biography: that the tropes of exceptionality and achievement so bound up with the genre of biography may clear a structural position for some “exceptional” women which inadvertently serves to uphold traditional gender hierarchies, cementing the cultural and political invisibility of those women whose lives chiefly play out in “unexceptional” private spheres. Footnote 65 Yet Forster also leaves considerable room for Wilson’s own experiences and concerns to unfold independently of, or even run counter to, those of her mistress. Lady’s Maid carefully teases out the intersection of gender with class, imagining the specific and too often undocumented experiences of Victorian female domestic servants and the frustrations their positions of dependency entailed.

Biofictions such as Forster’s, which depict lives circumscribed by their place in a historical class system, call into question the “agency aesthetic” that Lackey locates in biographical fiction as distinct from historical fiction. What readers “want from the biographical novel,” Lackey surmises, “is a model of a figure that transcends the deterministic forces of history and the environment.” Footnote 66 As the notion of agency has played a vital role in social justice discourses—and not least in gender theory—it is worth reflecting on the implications and limits of the agentic figure in biofiction. At first glance, this notion would seem to evoke the classic Carlylean hero whose biographical worthiness is measured by their impact in the public sphere—a model whose gendered undertones have long been called into question by feminist biography scholars. Footnote 67 The genre of biofiction is indeed populated by numerous political leaders, famous artists, notorious criminals, and pioneers of all sorts. Yet there are also figures like O’Farrell’s Agnes and Forster’s Elizabeth Wilson, in narratives that make do almost entirely without the high-flying distinction of Carlylean protagonists of History. Biofictions such as Hamnet and Lady’s Maid highlight how an author’s choice of perspective shapes our perception of which lives, occupations, decisions, or spheres of action seem historically significant and worthy of attention, and how gender plays a role in this. As such, they resonate with Virginia Woolf’s question in “The Art of Biography”:

whether the lives of great men only should be recorded. Is not anyone who has lived a life, and left a record of that life, worthy of biography—the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the illustrious? And what is greatness? And what smallness? We must revise our standards of merit and set up new heroes for our admiration. Footnote 68

And in doing so, we might usefully scrutinise our understanding of agency, too. A closer look at subaltern female protagonists of biofiction reveals complex relationships between historical position and agentic possibility, allowing us to question the stark dichotomy of historical and biographical fiction that Lackey proposes. Two biofictions that serve Lackey as evidence for the argument that biographical and historical fiction are fundamentally distinct invite further reflection: Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings: A Novel (1979) and Mary Morrissy’s The Rising of Bella Casey (2013). Bella Casey’s “Rising” coincides with the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland. At the beginning of the novel, Morrissy’s Bella is raped and impregnated by a clergyman. In her despair, and to avoid becoming a social outcast, she seduces her brother’s friend, which leads to an unhappy marriage, her husband’s early death after a syphilis infection (passed on to him via Bella’s rape), and her destitution. During the Easter Rising, towards the end of Bella’s life, the protagonist comes into possession of a piano and experiences a rare moment of hopefulness and possibility, followed rather quickly by her decision to take on hard menial labour, which ensues in bouts of sickness and her eventual death. Surprisingly, the short-lived epiphany at the piano—together with the fact that Morrissy has young Bella “ensnare” and “outmanoeuvre” her future husband to cover up her rape and pregnancy—suffices for Lackey to declare that the protagonist “has the desire, ability, and freedom to take agential control over her own life” Footnote 69 and leads him to read her story, like that of Ned Kelly in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang , as a “narrative about the power of individual agency and political autonomy.” Footnote 70 But if agency can be defined as the “power to take control of one’s life,” Footnote 71 the few glimpses Morrissy provides of Bella Casey’s agency are quickly submerged in the novel’s downward trajectory of crippling circumstance, economic hardship, and emotional suffering. Those moments of agency can, of course, be highlighted, insofar as they contribute to the shaping of a convincing, multi-dimensional character. However, if taken as a demonstration of biofiction’s commitment to agency, as that which sets it apart from historical fiction, the question arises as to what would constitute a non-agentic protagonist. To put it plainly, it is too easy to find patently agentic figures in “non-biographical” historical fiction—from Umberto Eco’s eccentric monk William of Baskerville in Il nome della rosa (1980) to Michel Faber’s inventive prostitute in The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) to Sarah Perry’s amateur palaeontologist in The Essex Serpent (2016)—for agency to hold as a defining feature of biographical fiction.

More important in the context of this volume, though, is the historically unequal distribution of crucial forms of agency along gender lines, and the ways in which biofiction reflects or engages with this. It is not least Bella Casey’s vulnerable position and upbringing as a woman in late nineteenth-century Ireland that curtails her possibilities for self-determination and eventually leads to her downfall, as Morrissy’s novel makes clear. While it may be possible to read her epiphany at the piano as symbolic of the agency of the Irish nation erupting in 1916 in political insurrection Footnote 72 (though Bella’s Protestantism would seem to complicate such a reading), an overemphasis on Bella’s agency threatens to obfuscate the novel’s critical engagement with the sex/gender system of the protagonist’s day. Through the figure of Bella, Morrissy’s novel marks “the insurmountable distance that existed between male and female societal expectations,” as Marisol Morales-Ladrón notes, and throws into relief “the limited choices women had.” Footnote 73 In other words, the fictionalised suffering of a historical woman—punctured though it may be by brief moments of hopefulness and determination—may also serve to render visible the social pressures and limitations placed on women at the time.

Not only does The Rising of Bella Casey point to sexual violence and its dramatic curbing of Bella’s options and expectations, it also counters a form of epistemic violence: the erasure of women from biographical and historical discourse. In an interview in which she addresses her feminist sympathies, Morrissy reveals that The Rising of Bella Casey was her response to renowned Irish playwright Seán O’Casey’s decision, in his experimental autobiography, to move his sister’s death forward by ten years: “This literary sororicide was what prompted me to write The Rising of Bella Casey . I felt his was a failure of the imagination; he couldn’t understand what had prompted her downfall and he hadn’t the capacity to see beyond appearances.” Footnote 74 Morrissy’s novel thus “raises” the figure of Bella from an untimely textual annihilation and from the obscurity that often befalls female subjects in history—but does so without overstating her agency.

A similar dynamic is at work in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings: A Novel , where the female protagonist’s experience of sexual oppression and her textual erasure intersect with the factor of race. The novel imagines a series of encounters between Thomas Jefferson’s ageing slave mistress Sally Hemings, who bore the late president and Founding Father several children, and census taker Nathan Langdon, who sets out to “white-wash” her record without her consent. The contradiction to which Chase-Riboud’s novel points so emphatically is summarised by Lackey as follows: “As the author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson affirmed the idea that all men are created equal and therefore have a natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But as a black woman, Hemings was not considered one of the ‘all men,’ so she was strategically excluded from the Declaration’s promises.” Footnote 75 Jefferson’s secret relationship with Hemings, the novel suggests, may have been at the heart of his removal of a clause prohibiting slavery from an earlier version of the Declaration of Independence. Focusing on the problematic relationship Chase-Riboud’s Sally symbolises between the institution of slavery and the political birth of the United States, Lackey convincingly demonstrates how Sally Hemings “offers us a way of understanding what would become America’s national identity.” Footnote 76

If we approach the agency of the biofictional subject in gendered terms, it is again worth pointing out that as a slave woman, Sally Hemings was at the receiving end of multiple intersecting forms of oppression, as Chase-Riboud’s novel makes clear. Already as an adolescent, the fictional Sally is well aware of the limits to her own agency. “Perhaps I had always known that he would claim me. Had not the same happened to my mother and my sisters? … I could hasten or delay that moment, but I felt powerless to prevent it.” Footnote 77 Once Jefferson has physically “claimed” her she thinks:

That other face, the public one, was the face of her enemy, her master. But one she owned. … When would he free her? she wondered. What if she asked him now … here? … She couldn’t, she was ashamed. The pallor, the soft eyes, the ribbon undone, the mouth softened by their kisses … He was smiling lazily at her. Even now after their moment of passion, there was a violence and a constraint about him that made her tremble. It was then she realized that he liked owning her. Footnote 78

Chase-Riboud draws a complex portrait of a woman who is simultaneously proud of her master’s physical attraction to her, of his need of and dependence on her, and habituated as a female slave into a subaltern position that would make it difficult for her to claim agency and demand her freedom or resist his advances. The narrative does sound out the limited forms of agency available to her, for example, when she later breaks off contact with census taker Langdon. By imagining such instances of self-determination, Sally Hemings also resonates with feminist debates about the limited utility of “victim feminism”: rather than portraying the central character as deprived of all agency, the novel carefully imagines the limited forms of agency available to Hemings at certain times.

Yet Sally Hemings does not celebrate these episodes in a manner that would eclipse the structural limitations under which the historical Hemings’s life unfolded, nor does Chase-Riboud’s protagonist ever really overcome those limitations. In their discussion of the place of “relational autonomy” in feminist thought, Peta Bowden and Jane Mummery address the scope and meaning of agency under oppressive conditions, noting that “the question remains as to whether choices made under such conditions could ever be autonomous in a meaningful sense. … Could autonomy really equate to carrying out choices that are just what would be expected on the basis of one’s socialization?” Footnote 79 In that sense, a biofiction that over-emphasises its protagonist’s agency may in fact work to downplay the system of often gendered norms and limitations that restricted the historical protagonist’s life course. Sally Hemings features a heroine with memories, ideas, and desires of her own, who makes occasional use of the limited agency available to her. But above all, Chase-Riboud’s novel renders visible the realities of those limitations placed on Sally Hemings as a female slave, a woman whose status deprives her of control over her own being and body in more than one way.

It is obvious how a transgender pioneer like Lili Elbe can be said to possess agency—”that power to take control of one’s life.” Footnote 80 Biographical novelists may often be drawn to a subject’s agency and highlight their capacity for self-invention. In Ebershoff’s novel on Elbe this becomes apparent not least in the way the author terminates the narrative shortly before the historical Elbe’s death after sex confirmation surgery—a strategy that grants Lili a moment of peace and contentment as her true self. In other biofictions, however, such as Sally Hemings and The Rising of Bella Casey , the limitations placed on the subject’s agency may be the very point of the narrative and a vital part of its politics. These novels, too, succeed in presenting a complex and engaging figure. Like many other biofictions, Chase-Riboud’s and Morrissy’s novels map a historical character’s outward existence and actions onto an inner landscape of motivation, suffering, beliefs, and desires in a manner that requires the author’s, and activates the reader’s, empathy. Such narratives illuminate how the conditions of agency are always also shaped by historically specific norms of gender, race, and class, which may have become internalised or may simply be too powerful for any one individual to overcome.

Making Gender Intelligible: Biofiction, Exemplarity, and Narrative Identity

Whether biofiction consolidates the status of cultural icons or sets out to rediscover marginalised lives, it partakes in the exemplary function Footnote 81 often attributed to biography. The subject of a biographical discourse comes to represent a certain way of inhabiting gender. While in 1994, Linda Wagner-Martin could still observe that female subjects of biographies are perceived as “eccentric rather than exemplary, and eccentricity is not a trait that wins admiration,” Footnote 82 recent decades have seen a change in attitudes. The appearance of numerous celebratory “lives” of women in the biography section of bookshops is matched by a similar boom in biofictions about “notable” women. Artemisia Gentileschi, for instance, emerges as an emblem of female artistic production and triumphant survivor of sexual violence in no fewer than five biographical novels. Footnote 83

Nor is female subjectivity—in its many historical manifestations—the only identity for which biofiction can help to create a narrative space. While feminist biographers and life-writing scholars have set the scene for a critique of the politics of exclusion evident in dominant forms of life narrative, movements for the equality of lesbian and gay, trans, intersex, or non-binary people have long discovered the relevance of life writing for their own causes. In his groundbreaking study Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuals (1998), Jay Prosser claims that for transsexuals, “narrative is not only the bridge to embodiment but a way of making sense of transition, the link between locations: the transition itself.” Footnote 84 What Prosser evokes here is the notion of narrative identity—that we are the stories we construct about ourselves. Rather than just making sense of a prior self, narrative thus becomes a way of bringing the self into being in the first place. Following Prosser, Jennifer Cooke posits narratives of self as significant points of identification for others. “If one’s identity is non-normative,” she argues, “then reading other similar personal stories is a (trans)formative act.” Footnote 85 Life-writing scholar and gender theorist Quinn Eades illustrates this as he remembers his first encounter with Leslie Feinberg’s autobiographical novel Stone Butch Blues :

It took me 17 years to work out why I couldn’t breathe while I read Feinberg’s words, ingested them, let them lay down in me. That day I pulled my first binder over my head and then struggled the black nylon down to flatten breast chest belly hips, then t-shirt over the top, then mirror gaze from front and side—a flood of incredulous recognition, an internal and pushing-all-ways yes—and there was Feinberg’s ghost text reaching out from/with the body to touch/stroke/hold/enfold me all over again. Footnote 86

The relevance of others’ life stories to the formation of the self is also stressed by Wendy Moffat when she considers a “documentable queer textual past” as “foundational to the construction of gay identity.” Footnote 87 Emma Donoghue, reflecting on the queer protagonist Jenny Bonnet of her biographical novel Frog Music , makes the same argument with reference to biofiction: “I think it’s crucial for us to know about queer life before now. If we only seem to exist now, then we look like a shallow phase. We look like a meme, something that’s just gone viral. Establishing a history that was not very visible before makes you feel like a grownup.” Footnote 88

Going beyond literature’s role of helping to consolidate one’s own identity, Moffat also evokes the function of life narrative—including biofiction—as a “call for empathy” towards other identities. As such, literature can, for instance, become a means of “awakening us to the lived experience of transgendered people.” Footnote 89 In her recent book Transgender and the Literary Imagination (2017), Rachel Carroll goes one step further as she explores the extent to which transgender narratives “give visibility or voice to transgender histories and identities.” Footnote 90 Looking beyond the individual reader’s experience of empathy, Carroll notes “the role played by historical, literary and film narrative in shaping ‘conditions of intelligibility.’” Footnote 91 Referencing Judith Butler’s work, Footnote 92 Carroll thus highlights the broader cultural implications of transgender narratives as vectors of empowerment and acknowledges the role of fiction in carving out a discursive space in which diverse and non-normative identities can become culturally intelligible.

Biofiction specifically can take on a vital role in endeavours to explore and expand possibilities for certain identities, not just through its referentiality—that is, its grounding in, and reference to, real lives—but also because of its affective power and reach. David Ebershoff’s award-winning novel The Danish Girl (2000), about Lili Elbe, illustrates this. Based on Niels Hoyer’s account of Elbe’s transition in Man into Woman: The First Sex Change (1933), Ebershoff’s book became an international bestseller at a time when LGBT groups worldwide were campaigning for equality and more inclusive legislation. In 2015, the novel was adapted into a screenplay by Lucinda Coxton; the motion picture The Danish Girl was eventually produced and released in 2015 to great acclaim, under the direction of Tom Hooper and starring Eddie Redmayne as Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe and Alicia Vikander, who went on to win an Academy Award for her performance as Wegener’s wife Gerda. Based on Ebershoff’s novel, the film was largely considered an important step in rendering historical trans experience visible on a broad scale. The avid debates about its (lack of) historical accuracy and criticism of the casting Footnote 93 testify to the significance that may be attributed to fictional representations of exemplary figures. The example of The Danish Girl demonstrates not only how biographical fiction can work to amplify trans history but also how it can assume a mediating function between different life writing media and genres.

Some lives become starting points for multiple—and often conflicting—trajectories of gendered identification and appropriation even within the genre of biofiction. James Miranda Barry, an illustrious Irish-born army surgeon who was reportedly revealed on his death to have been biologically female, is a case in point here. When US-American author E.J. Levy announced in 2019 that her forthcoming novel The Cape Doctor would centre on James Miranda Barry, “a heroine for our time, for all time,” and referred to her subject as “she,” Footnote 94 the novelist attracted criticism from transgender communities for disrespecting Barry’s self-chosen masculine identity. In response, Levy pointed to various biographical treatments of Barry as a cross-dressing woman to justify her approach—a gesture that ties her biofiction to “factual” biography. And indeed, as Ann Heilmann’s comprehensive study of “Neo/Victorian Biographilia” about Barry, which also examines several biofictions, illustrates, the surgeon’s gender identity was overwhelmingly given as female in textual treatments of the past 150 years—“as a cross-dressing woman rather than a transman.” Footnote 95 June Rose’s 1977 biography The Perfect Gentleman: The Remarkable Life of Dr James Miranda Barry, the Woman Who Served as an Officer in the British Army from 1813 to 1859 (which also uses female pronouns) illustrates the pervasiveness of this view, as does the title of the 2016 book by Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield,  Dr James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time .” Footnote 96

Moving away from the idea of Barry as a feminist icon of gender transgression, other narratives cast Barry as a transgender man or an intersex person. Footnote 97 Patricia Duncker, who discusses her acclaimed 1999 novel James Miranda Barry in the final chapter of this volume, also chose a rather different approach to her subject. Duncker’s biofiction, which shifts between narrative perspectives and pronominal markers of gender, does not settle on a single or stable gender identity for its protagonist. Her Barry novel can thus be said to do the work of “queer life-writing” as defined by Dallas Baker: a type of life narrative that undertakes “a critical and radical deconstruction of identity, of heteronormativity and of binary gender and sexual norms.” Footnote 98 As such, queer life narratives unsettle the link between bodies and gendered subjectivities, as Duncker’s text does in more than one way: it leaves both the gender identity and the protagonist’s sense of self in flux and open to conjecture.

Carroll explains the conspicuous divergence between narrative versions of a transgender life with reference to the varied meanings that “the historical practice of ‘gender crossing’ has acquired … in women’s, lesbian and gay, and queer historiography.” Footnote 99 Her study addresses the often problematic effects of such competing claims, for instance, when the conventions of transsexual life writing erase intersex narratives (in the case of Ebershoff’s biofiction of Elbe Footnote 100 ) or when “feminist narratives of women’s gender crossing … have the effect—however inadvertently—of erasing transgender narratives” (in the case of Duncker’s James Miranda Barry Footnote 101 ). Carroll’s study also demonstrates that the varied meanings of certain gendered practices come particularly to the fore in comparative readings of narratives about the “same” historical subject, an approach that has variously been called “comparative biography” Footnote 102 or metabiography. Footnote 103 The case of James Miranda Barry demonstrates how renowned subjects can go through cycles of reclaiming, mythologisation, and revision in biographical discourse—including in biofiction. With the boom in biographical fiction over the last decades and the accumulation of fictional texts about certain illustrious individuals, it is unsurprising that scholars have increasingly taken an interest in the evolution of fictional treatments of prominent subjects. Footnote 104 A cross-textual analysis, as can be found in some of the contributions to this volume, does much to clarify the different meanings that become attached to a figure in various cultural and historical contexts. What Ní Dhúill has proposed for biography studies also holds true for biofiction: that a metabiographical approach, which focuses on “how the biographical discourse on a single figure shifts and accumulates over time to form a complex palimpsest of portraits,” can “reveal much about the changing positions of biographer and reader, about changing conceptions of subjectivity, and about the changing understandings of how individual lives relate to larger structures and processes.” Footnote 105 More specifically, metabiographical readings of biofiction can serve to establish what the possibilities of fiction are when it comes to imagining the experience of gender in past lives. By reading differently imagined versions alongside and against each other, metabiographical analyses help to highlight innovative treatments of gendered identities and plots or, conversely, reveal the persistence of conventional tropes of femininity, masculinity, and gender normativity in biofiction.

The Ethics of Biographical Fiction

Levy’s novel The Cape Doctor has since been published, its protagonist renamed “Jonathan Mirandus Perry,” in all likelihood to evade criticism for the author’s choice of pronouns by lightly decoupling her text from the historical figure. While this decision moves The Cape Doctor into the realm of what Kohlke has termed “glossed biofiction,” Footnote 106 the controversy around the novel also highlights what is at stake in re-imagining famous lives in fiction. Various communities are invested in historically “correct” representations—in gender terms—of Barry, regardless of the fact that today we have no way of knowing with any certainty how Barry would have self-identified in an age when present-day categories of gender identity were unavailable. The status of a text as fiction does not apparently relieve an author of their perceived responsibility either towards the historical individual or towards constituencies of readers who have a gender-political stake in the individual’s biography.

The idea of the writer’s responsibility towards the historical subject and their afterlife in cultural memory brings us to the question of biofiction’s ethics, which has implications beyond narrative gender assignment. The genre’s creative licence renders it a site of important cultural work in the view of many readers and critics. Thus, biofiction is often said to “give a voice” to disenfranchised subjects—a metaphor that enjoys some popularity in biofiction scholarship and also appears repeatedly in contributions to the present volume. The idea is that biofiction can help redress a lack of representation that is manifest on various discursive levels—in biography and historiography but also on the primary level of archival material. Where factual biography finds itself impoverished by the gender bias of archives or works around the gaps by meticulously pointing them out to the reader, Footnote 107 biofiction, powered by imagination, can venture right into the void. The liberty of novelists or playwrights may be curbed somewhat by the possibility of legal disputes when subjects or their direct descendants feel misrepresented by a text, Footnote 108 but the artistic ethos of novelists or playwrights does not dictate close adherence to biographical facts. Biofiction thus has a vital role to play in rendering visible those subjects and experiences that have fallen through the grid of traditional androcentric history. Hence, with regard to women’s lives, fiction can paradoxically become “an arena for granting female experience an equivalent reality in the public sphere,” as Max Saunders points out. Footnote 109

The “voice” metaphor is problematic, however, when we consider its epistemological implications. Biofiction may well be “one of the aesthetic forms par excellence for mediating, remediating, and shaping popular perceptions of the past,” as Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben state, Footnote 110 but the kind of knowledge it produces about its subject is qualified by the text’s status as fiction. Obvious though it may seem, the biofictional subject’s experiences, thoughts, and utterances spring from the writer’s mind and are based to varying (and sometimes negligible) degrees on historical research. To put it plainly: the “recovered voice” is not recovered but invented. In this sense, the “voice” granted a subject through biofiction is that of a ventriloquist, Footnote 111 raising critical questions around agency and appropriation.

On a related note, biofictions can be seen as invading the privacy of their subjects, filling certain gaps that historical persons may well have left on purpose. Even where public achievement governs the choice of subject, the historical reputation of the central figure often functions as a point of entry into their private tribulations and intimate experiences—irrespective of their gender. The decision to re-write the life of an already famous woman may be a politically motivated attempt to elevate the private sphere as a historically significant zone of human (inter-)action, but it may also align with contemporary celebrity culture’s voyeuristic desire to pry into the privacy of prominent figures. Footnote 112

Such invasions assume particular poignancy in the context of transgender biography, as Jack Halberstam notes. Halberstam discusses transgender biography as “a sometimes violent, often imprecise project which seeks to brutally erase the carefully managed details of the life of a passing person” and which often “recasts the act of passing as deception, dishonesty and fraud.” Footnote 113 In the context of biofiction, the re-telling of trans lives may seem less problematic with a figure like Lili Elbe, who collaborated in Niels Hoyer’s account of her transition. Hence David Ebershoff’s novel about Elbe was based on her public self-disclosure and her own view of her identity. By contrast, the lived reality of the private parts and sexual preferences of James Miranda Barry were not disclosed by the subject, yet fictional accounts often take the ethically questionable step of imagining these disclosures. Footnote 114

That said, biofiction has its own means of interrogating its fraught relation to the historical subject and challenging readers’ expectations with regard to gendered plots and subjectivities. An example is the suicide plot, which has become a gendered blueprint for telling creative women’s lives. Feminist critics have often denounced as reductive and disrespectful the way in which the work of female authors is read in relation to mental health and suicide at the expense of a sufficient focus on their creative output. Footnote 115 Accounts of Sylvia Plath’s life and work, for instance, have traditionally been overshadowed by the author’s early suicide, epitomised by the title of Ronald Hayman’s book The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath . It is all the more remarkable, then, that novelist Kate Moses ended Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath on a hopeful note, before the poet’s suicide, thus foregoing such easy teleology and sensationalism. It can, of course, be argued that biofiction as a genre is tacitly proleptic in that readers will be aware of the basic outline of a famous subject’s life story from the start, and that Plath’s suicide will always be an unspoken presence in the novel. However, with her “omission”—as some readers will surely perceive it—of the suicide, Moses can be said to take a stand for the inherent value of the poet’s lived experience and creative achievement.

Apart from such basic structural decisions, there are other textual choices that signal an author’s engagement with ethical questions. In her monograph Autobiographies of Others , Lucia Boldrini pays close attention to the ethical implications of narrative situations and pronominal choices in what she terms “heterobiography”: “novels that gesture towards historical factuality and literary fictionality, towards ‘truth’ and invention, and exist under the sign of an essential displacement (the ‘autobiography’ is written by another) that brings to the foreground structural, narrative, and ethical issues also central to autobiography itself.” Footnote 116 Engaging with the dialogic structure of Anna Banti’s Artemisia , Boldrini reads Banti’s novel as “a reflection of the difficulties that exceptional women encounter in trying to assert themselves.” Footnote 117 Significantly, the heterobiographical “double I” of the first half of the novel gives way to a third-person narrative which, for Boldrini, signals the narrator’s “moment of letting go,” that is, “of recognition and respect for the integrity, unknowability, separateness of the other woman.” Footnote 118

Patricia Duncker’s play with narrative and pronominal situations in James Miranda Barry is another case in point here. Beyond illustrating the inscrutability of her subject’s gender identity, Duncker’s fragmented approach also speaks to our necessarily tenuous grasp of all past subjectivities. Reflecting on Duncker’s strategies of deliberate fragmentation and ambiguity, Heilmann muses that “it is as if the Barry of fiction much more than that of biography existed only in fragments, always at a distance from us, ultimately unknowable.” Footnote 119 In her refusal to construct a coherent inner life for her protagonist, Duncker “deliberately foils readerly identification processes, instead splintering her narrative as a marker of the patchy and erratic nature of the ‘evidence’ of Barry’s life and the futility of attempting to confine Barry to an orthodox textual/sexual framework,” as Heilmann notes. Footnote 120 Through the means of experimental fiction, Banti’s and Duncker’s biographical novels can thus be said to flag their speculative relationship to a past life with greater honesty than many a biography. What these experiments in biofiction accomplish is to open up a space for metabiographical reflection. Footnote 121 It is this space that the chapters of this volume seek to map in greater detail.

The Chapters in This Book

The chapters that follow investigate how biographical fictions reflect and re-write available narratives and tropes of gender. The analyses they offer uncover tensions between relationality, empowerment, and agency in life stories within and beyond the gender binary and relate them to cultural and historical differences in both “raw” biographical material and fictional reworking. Exploring the role of creativity in imagining feminist, queer, and non-binary pasts, they investigate the processes of identification and (re-)imagination, instrumentalisation, and distortion that shape historical lives into fiction.

Part I—“Recovery, Revision, Ventriloquism: Imagining Historical Women”—examines the positioning of historical women in biofiction, exploring the ethical questions that arise when novelists re-tell the story of an other person’s life. Diana Wallace’s opening chapter “‘Everything Is Out of Place’: Virginia Woolf, Women, and (Meta-)Historical Biofiction” takes Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928) as the starting point of a reflection on the interactions of biography, history, and fiction in meta-historical biofictions by and about Virginia Woolf. Keeping Woolf’s own metaphor of the “out of place”-ness of women’s stories in view, Wallace develops a model of reading biofiction that troubles binary oppositions. Drawing on Monica Latham’s work in dialogue with Edward Soja’s trialectical thought, Wallace’s analysis of five novels about Virginia Woolf demonstrates contemporary authors’ creative engagement with Woolf’s life and thinking while also pointing to their reliance on conventionally gendered narrative patterns that Woolf herself rejected. While Virginia Woolf as a “world-historical” woman writer has long served other authors as a reference point of literary achievement, interest in Lucia Joyce—the subject of Laura Cernat’s chapter “Fictional Futures for a Buried Past: Representations of Lucia Joyce”—is a more recent phenomenon. Cernat discusses biofictional portrayals of Lucia Joyce in light of the one-sided representation of her in biographical sources as the mentally ill daughter of a renowned and brilliant father, and focuses specifically on the alternative futures such fictions develop for their subject. Cernat then contrasts these biofictions with representations of Lucia Joyce in visual media—a graphic novel and films—to compare their effectiveness in reclaiming the subject as an accomplished dancer and in projecting a subtler understanding of the intersections between her gender and her mental life. Silvia Salino’s chapter “Imagining Jiang Qing: The Biographer’s Truth in Anchee Min’s Becoming Madame Mao ” also examines a biofictional counter-narrative to dominant androcentric histories—an effort at reclaiming a female point of view which in Min’s novel also takes on an intercultural dimension. Salino draws on Linda Hutcheon’s theory of postmodernism to shed light on Min’s deconstruction of the prevalent historical discourse about Jiang Qing and the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s. Highlighting Min’s trope of life as performance, Salino uncovers a level of metabiographical self-reflection in the novel’s appropriation of Qing’s voice that points to the epistemological pitfalls of biographical reconstruction and highlights the importance of narrative perspective in biofiction.

The three chapters in Part II—“Re-imagining the Early Modern Subject”—look at biofictions in which Tudor England, with its familiar royal cast, serves as a site of re-negotiation with regard to gender roles. In her chapter “From Betrayed Wife to Betraying Wife: Rewriting Katherine of Aragon as Catalina in Philippa Gregory’s The Constant Princess ,” Bethan Archer reads Gregory’s novel of 2005 against the foil of historical and popular representations of Henry VIII’s first queen as pious and undesirable obstacle to Anne Boleyn’s ascent. Gregory recasts Katherine as a scheming figure whose progressive political vision is likely to resonate with modern readers; her “Catalina” becomes a surprisingly agentic character. On close inspection, however, Archer finds the heroine’s transgressions tempered by narrative choices that can be understood as concessions to a conservative readership. Alison Gorlier’s chapter “Jean Plaidy and Philippa Gregory Fighting for Gender Equality Through Katherine Parr’s Narrative” offers a comparative reading of two novels published over six decades apart, both centred on Henry VIII’s sixth marriage. Relating each narrative to the social conditions and gender equality policies of its day, Gorlier reveals a subtle shift from pre-second-wave feminist thought to contemporary (post-)feminist concerns. At different points in time, both narratives thus anchor women’s struggle for equality in a historical figure who emerges as an exemplary—if anachronistic—emblem of female survival and emancipation in the context of patriarchal oppression. Interactions between self and other, distant past and present in biofiction are rendered more complex still in Australian authors’ novels about the Tudors, as Kelly Gardiner and Catherine Padmore observe. In their chapter “Australian Women Writing Tudor Lives,” the authors take their cue from Jerome de Groot’s notion of “double othering,” which describes the distance between the cultural context of writers and readers of historical fiction and the often distant or different cultural settings of the narratives they read and write. Examining recent novels by four Australian women authors—Jesse Blackadder, Jane Caro, Michelle Diener, and Wendy J. Dunn—which feature historical Tudor heroines and drawing on these writers’ paratextual statements about their work, Gardiner and Padmore tease out the specifically Australian elements in Australian Tudor biofictions. They perceptively demonstrate how the novelists’ feminist search for ownership of Tudor history is complicated by their postcolonial position.

Biofictions about authors refract larger questions of gender through the specific challenges and motivations of the creative life, as the chapters in Part III—“Writing the Writer: History, Voyeurism, Victimisation”—demonstrate. Such “author fictions” Footnote 122 also have the merit of “opening” historical authors to a contemporary readership, as Monica Latham observes in her study of Virginia Woolf’s afterlives. Footnote 123 While the fresh critical engagement with women’s lives offered by many of the chapters highlights the need for continued re-reading and re-imagining of biofictions within and beyond binaristic paradigms, Paul Fagan’s contribution in this section is specifically addressed to the possibility of writing non-normative masculine identity in biofiction. In a comparative reading of two biographical novels on Henry James—Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author —Fagan shows how the plot needs of biofiction combine with a modern conception of compulsory sexuality to determine the narration of celibacy. The speculative space of biofiction is viewed in its full ambivalence here, as a field of indeterminacy which, paradoxically, can enforce a particular reading of gaps and silences. Ina Bergmann’s chapter “In Poe’s Shadow: Frances Sargent Osgood” deals with the representation of relationship in biofictions that remain within a conventionally heteronormative framework. Interrogating biofiction’s role as a form of popular literary history, Bergmann examines two novels about the nineteenth-century poet Frances Sargent Osgood, whose standing in American literary history has been eclipsed by her personal relationship with Edgar Allan Poe. Bergmann proposes the label “double historical biofiction” to capture the novels’ approach of giving room to, and thus creating interest in, their heroine while still relying on the male subject’s fame. Here as in other chapters, we are reminded of the risks of relational biography—in which a female life is “recovered” from the shadow of a prominent male life. In her chapter on biographical dramas centred on the life of the Polish modernist playwright Stanisława Przybyszewska, Ksenia Shmydkaya explores the possibilities and limits of “biodrama” and identifies the ethical pitfalls of theatrical versions of Przybyszewska’s story. Shmydkaya notes how the temptation to reduce the subject to a cipher—for damaged female genius, insanity, and victimhood, or, when seen from a Western vantage point, for a distinctively Polish tragic artistic identity—results in a failure to engage with Przybyszewska’s works and thought, or to take seriously the philosophical edifice she erected from a lifelong preoccupation with the French Revolution. As with the biofictions on Frances Sargent Osgood discussed in Ina Bergmann’s chapter, here too we are confronted with a gesture of recovery that can tend to reinscribe the patriarchal conditions it sets out to illuminate.

Tensions between the demands of creativity and the constraints of gender are a perennial theme in biographies and biofictions of women artists, writers, and scientists and are explored in detail in Part IV, “Creativity and Gender in the Arts and Sciences.” We might expect treatments of this theme to be historically mutable, shifting to reflect the changing concerns of biographers and biofiction authors and their readers, so it is all the more striking to find continuities between accounts that are remote from each other in time. Julia Dabbs reads two recent biographical novels on the early modern artist Sofonisba Anguissola, comparing these with the early modern treatments that founded the biographical discourse on this virtuosa . The desire for independence and the mastery of technique in a male-dominated field of endeavour are key themes across both the early accounts and the later fictional reworkings; more surprising is the reworking of plot elements from the early modern sources that go against the grain of conventional understandings of historical gender relations. Thus, if Anguissola proposed marriage to a sea-captain during a voyage to Genoa—as the historical sources have it—then we may be perplexed to read a twenty-first-century fictionalised account that domesticates this biographeme by reinstating the more usual gender roles. Here as elsewhere, the novelist’s understandings of gender work with the dictates of genre and the expectations of readership to determine the construction of gender relations in the text. A different kind of creativity is at the centre of Christine Müller’s chapter “The ‘Mother of the Theory of Relativity’? Re-imagining Mileva Marić in Marie Benedict’s The Other Einstein (2016).” Albert Einstein’s first wife emerges in biofiction as a tragic figure whose brilliance remains unrecognised, her ambitions thwarted in the patriarchal field of science. Through a critical feminist perspective and with reference to the history of women in science, Müller points up the ambivalence of Benedict’s novel, which reclaims Marić as an exemplary female scientist while resorting to standard tropes of female inspiration and victimhood.

The final section, “Queering Biofiction,” considers the contrast between conventional illusionistic biofiction and experimental biofiction on the boundaries of prose, poetry, and epistolary life writing, probing the possibilities of writing gender in more exploratory ways. Iseult Gillespie’s reading of Aaron Apps’s prose-poem sequence Dear Herculine reveals a complex layering of dialogic auto/biographical reflection, in which the contemporary author speaks across time to the historical figure of Herculine Barbin. Brought to prominence through her catalytic effect for the gender philosophy of Michel Foucault, Barbin is imagined, in Apps’s text, in terms that seek to honour and not domesticate the experience of intersex embodiment. Refusing to contain his subject within the medicalising discourse which imposed a gender reassignment on the historical Barbin, Apps draws on archival documents, including Barbin’s memoir, as well as on personal experience of intersex subjectivity to create a resonant poetic text that, as Gillespie shows, pushes against the limits of biofiction. The volume is rounded off by an interview the editors conducted with eminent novelist and literary critic Patricia Duncker on her neo-Victorian biofictions James Miranda Barry (1999) and Sophie and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance (2015), the latter revolving around nineteenth-century novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). In the interview, Duncker historicises responses to Barry and explains her own approach to transcending gender binaries in creative fiction. Reflecting on her work on Eliot, she addresses the problematic idea of a female line of tradition and her own particular urge to “write back” to her famous predecessor. She outlines the possibilities, but also the ethical limits, of the licence to speculate in biofiction and criticises the tendency of historical fiction to “assault the nineteenth century with the sensibility of the twentieth” (and twenty-first).

Attentive to a range of approaches to fictionalisation that reclaim, appropriate, or reinvent their biographical “raw material,” the chapters of this volume variously demonstrate the effect of cliché, gender norms, and established narratives in biographical fiction, while also exploring the potential for subversion and critique that inheres in biofiction’s speculative and imaginative engagement with past lives.

Change history

23 february 2023.

The original version of this chapter was revised: this chapter was previously published non-open access. It has been changed to Open Access.

For a discussion of the reception of biofiction, see Michael Lackey’s introduction to Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014) and “Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 3–10, https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2016.1095583 .

Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1.

Michael Lackey, The American Biographical Novel (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 14.

Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Glyph 7 (1980): 210.

As regards recent biofiction scholarship, Michael Lackey defines the genre exclusively as “literature that names its protagonist after an actual biographical figure” (e.g. Lackey, “Locating,” 3), while Marie-Luise Kohlke includes fictions about famous historical characters who have been assigned different names as “glossed biofiction.” Kohlke, “Neo-Victorian Biofiction and the Special/Spectral Case of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus ,” Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 18, no. 3 (2013): 11. We agree with Lackey that the actual name of the protagonist accomplishes something specific in biofiction. As in its neighbouring genre the biopic, biofiction’s use of the real name “suggests an openness to historical scrutiny” that accounts for biofiction’s dual allegiance to creative invention and biographical fact. George F. Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 8. The case could be made, though, that a narrative whose characters and plots are very obviously based on certain historical personages will initiate a similar kind of hybrid reading.

Moving to the other end of the spectrum, there are fictions that rely on a famous name but hardly refer to the historical subject’s biography. We would again consider texts such as Stephanie Barron’s Jane Austen Mysteries as on the very fringe of biographical fiction, as the historical author is turned into a detective figure who solves murder mysteries that clearly bear no relation to Austen’s life. Hence, as Barron’s fictions display very little interest in Austen’s “real history,” it would be difficult to justify calling them “biographical.” Such loose referentiality may be better captured by a term such as Wolfgang Müller’s “interfigurality.” See Müller, “Interfigurality. A Study on the Interdependence of Literary Figures,” in Intertextuality , ed. Heinrich F. Plett (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991), 101–21. The distinction is one of degree rather than kind.

This latter criterion helps to distinguish biofiction from literary biography, whose artful style may often approach that of fiction, but which avoids making things up. See, for instance, Julia Novak, “Experiments in Life-Writing: Introduction,” in Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing 3, ed. Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017), 7–8, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-55414-3_1 .

Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben further understand biofiction as “a multi-media umbrella term” that includes biographical motion pictures. Kohlke and Gutleben, “Taking Biofictional Liberties: Tactical Games and Gambits with Nineteenth-Century Lives,” in Neo-Victorian Biofiction: Reimagining Nineteenth-Century Historical Subjects , ed. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2020), 3. While we acknowledge the affinity of biofiction with biopics, we do not treat the latter in this volume, unless where films about a certain subject throw into relief the work of the biofictions (as in Laura Cernat’s contribution). Biopic scholarship has gained much traction within film studies in recent decades and has brought forth its own extensive body of media-specific research. For a recent, gender-focused contribution to the field, see the European Journal of Life Writing ’s special issue on “Women’s Lives on Screen,” edited by Eugenie Theuer and Julia Novak.

David Lodge, The Year of Henry James: The Story of a Novel: With Other Essays on the Genesis, Composition, and Reception of Literary Fiction (London: Penguin, 2007), 8.

Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel , The New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2009), 1.

See Michael Lackey, “The Rise of the Biographical Novel and the Fall of the Historical Novel,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 33–58. Lackey proposes a “shift from the historical to the biographical novel” in the twentieth century (Lackey, “The Rise,” 54), and that the biographical novel has “supplanted the classical historical novel” (Lackey, “The Rise,” 33; see also “Introduction: The Agency Aesthetics of Biofiction in the Age of Postmodern Confusion,” in Conversations with Biographical Novelists , ed. Michael Lackey [New York: Bloomsbury, 2019], 1–20). In our estimation, such a view can only be maintained if one considers - as Lackey does - Georg Lukács’s (1937) partial conception of the work of Scott, Balzac, and Tolstoy as representative of “the historical novel” in general, and if one ignores the varied directions in which historical fiction has developed over the past century. While biofiction has certainly become a prominent form of historical fiction particularly in recent decades, “non-biographical” historical fiction continues to enjoy both tremendous popularity and critical success. Nor do we subscribe to an opposition of biographical and historical fiction on the basis of a realism/surrealism dichotomy or the protagonist’s agency. While realism can indeed be said to be a dominant mode of historical fiction today, there are also biofictions such as Margaret Forster’s Lady’s Maid that are staunchly realist, as well as other forms of historical fiction that break with realism, such as historiographic metafiction. We discuss agency in gendered terms below.

For a detailed discussion of definitions of historical fiction, see the first chapter in Caterina Grasl, Oedipal Murders and Nostalgic Resurrections: The Victorians in Historical Middlebrow Fiction, 1914–1959 (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014). On the development of the historical novel in the twentieth century, see, for instance, the works of Elodie Rousselot (“neo-historical novel”), Ina Bergmann (“new historical fiction”), or Ansgar Nünning, who sketches various innovative directions in which the historical novel has developed over the past decades in terms of a spectrum of variants rather than placing experimental, self-reflexive modes such as historiographic metafiction in opposition to the more traditionally realist currents of historical fiction. Rouselleto, ed., Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-historical Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Bergmann, The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed: The New Historical Fiction , Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature (New York: Routledge, 2021); Nünning, “Von der fiktionalen Historie zur metahistoriographischen Fiktion: Bausteine für eine narratologische und funktionsgeschichtliche Theorie, Typologie und Geschichte des postmodernen historischen Romans,” in Literatur und Geschichte: Ein Kompendium zu ihrem Verhältnis von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart , ed. Daniel Fulda and Silvia Serena Tschopp (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), 540–69. On the gendered implications of rigid definitions of the historical novel, see Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 10.

See, for instance, Grasl, Oedipal Murders ; Bergmann, The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed ; Katherine Cooper and Emma Short, eds., The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Dorothea Flothow, “Those Gay Days of Wickedness and Wit”: the Restoration Period in Popular Historiographies (18th–21st Centuries) (Heidelberg: Winter, 2021); some contributions in Kelly Gardiner and Catherine Padmore, eds., “Historical Biofictions from Australia and New Zealand,” special issue, TEXT 26, no. 66 (2022).

De Groot, The Historical Novel , 3.

Emma Donoghue, “Voicing the Nobodies in the Biographical Novel,” interviewed by Michael Lackey, Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe , ed. Michael Lackey (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 85.

Kristin Ramsdell, Romance Fiction: A Guide to the Genre (Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1999), 115.

Helen Hughes, The Historical Romance (London: Routledge, 1993), 2; Ramsdell, Romance Fiction , 138.

Hughes, The Historical Romance , 17.

Derek Parker, Nell Gwyn (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), 11–12; Charles Beauclerk, Nell Gwyn: Mistress to a King (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), 37–39.

Hughes, The Historical Romance , 127.

Diane Haeger, The Perfect Royal Mistress (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007), 7.

Hughes, The Historical Romance , 39.

See Ramsdell, Romance Fiction , 114.

Ann Maxwell and Jayne Krentz, “The Wellsprings of Romance (1989),” in Women and Romance: A Reader , ed. Susan Ostrov Weisser (New York: NY University Press, 2001), 351.

Haeger, The Perfect Royal Mistress , 399.

The Perfect Royal Mistress is, in fact, one of several novels published about Gwyn in recent decades. For a more detailed critique of Gwyn novels, see Julia Novak, “Nell Gwyn in Contemporary Romance Novels: Biography and the Dictates of ‘Genre Literature,’” Contemporary Women’s Writing 8, no. 3 (Oxford UP, 2014): 373–90; and Novak, “Feminist to Postfeminist: Contemporary Biofictions by and about Women Artists,” Angelaki 22, no. 1 (2017): 223–30. See also Laura Martínez-García, “Restoration Celebrity Culture: Twenty-First-Century Regenderings and Rewritings of Charles II, the Merry Monarch, and his Mistress ‘Pretty, Witty’ Nell Gwyn,” Anglia 138, no. 1 (2020): 118–43.

See, for instance, Parker, Nell Gwyn 2000; Beauclerk, Nell Gwyn .

Haeger, The Perfect Royal Mistress , 320.

Barbara Fuchs, Romance: The New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2004), 126. See also Hughes, The Historical Romance , 129.

Catherine Roach, “Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy,” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1, no.1 (2010): 6.

Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2009), 5.

See Zachary Leader’s definition of life writing as “a range of writings about lives or parts of lives, or which provide materials out of which lives or parts of lives are composed. These writings include not only memoir, autobiography, biography, diaries, autobiographical fiction, and biographical fiction, but also letters, writs, wills, written anecdotes, depositions, court proceedings …, marginalia, nonce writings, lyric poems, scientific and historical writings, and digital forms.” Leader, “Introduction,” in On Life-Writing , ed. Zachary Leader (Oxford: OUP, 2015), 1. Biofiction research has also been featured by life-writing journals, see, for example, Michael Lackey’s (ed.) special issues on biofiction in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 and 36, no. 1; Boldrini and Novak’s (eds.) volume Experiments in Life Writing in the Palgrave Studies in Life Writing series; and Novak’s article on Clara Schumann and Artemisia Gentileschi biofictions: “Father and Daughter across Europe: The Journeys of Clara Wieck Schumann and Artemisia Gentileschi in Fictionalised Biographies,” European Journal of Life Writing 1 (2012): 41–57, https://doi.org/10.5463/ejlw.1.25 .

Lee, Biography , 6.

John F. Keener, Biography and the Postmodern Historical Novel (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 2001), 2.

Lackey, The American Biographical Novel , 12.

Donoghue, “Voicing the Nobodies,” 82.

David Ebershoff, “The Biographical Novel as Life Art,” in Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists , ed. Michael Lackey (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 100 and 102.

Ibid., 103.

Lodge, “The Bionovel as a Hybrid Genre,” interview by Bethany Layne, Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe , ed. Michael Lackey (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 120.

Ibid., 122.

Jay Parini, “Reflections on Biographical Fiction,” in Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists , ed. Michael Lackey (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 212. These novelists’ statements thus resonate with Ina Schabert’s view of “fictional biography”—a term often used synonymously with biofiction—as “engaged in the comprehension of real historical individuals by means of the sophisticated instruments of knowing and articulating knowledge that contemporary fiction offers.” Schabert, In Quest of the Other Person: Fiction as Biography (Tübingen: Francke, 1990), 4.

Lee, Biography , 3.

Donoghue, “Voicing the Nobodies,” 91.

Kevin Barry, “Positive Contamination in the Biographical Novel,” interviewed by Stuart Kane, in Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe , ed. Michael Lackey (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 24.

Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography , Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (Cham: Palgrave, 2020), 122.

Sara Alpern, ed., The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 5–7.

Lucia Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction , Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature 26 (New York: Routledge, 2012), 153.

Stephanie Bird, Recasting Historical Women: Female Identity in German Biographical Fiction (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 1.

Ní Dhúill, Metabiography , 79. In this context, Kohlke proposes the category “biofictions of marginalized subjects.” Kohlke, “Neo-Victorian Biofiction,” 9. Gender hierarchies are, of course, not the only principle governing the positioning of sousveillant subjects in biofiction. Like Richard Burton’s servant in Trojanow’s Der Weltensammler ( The Collector of Worlds ), such figures can equally be found in colonial contexts, where they may or may not articulate a postcolonial critique of their famous co-subjects. See Ní Dhúill, Metabiography , chapter 4, for a more detailed discussion of this point.

Stephanie Merritt, “Tragic Tale of the Latin Tutor’s Son,” review of Hamnet , by Maggie O’Farrell, The Guardian , March 29, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/29/hamnet-by-maggie-o-farrell-review .

John Mullan, “A Brilliantly Observed Historical Novel,” review of Hamnet , by Maggie O’Farrell, New Statesman , November 18, 2020, https://www.newstatesman.com/Maggie-ofarrell-hamnet-review .

Beate Neumeier, “The Truth of Fiction—The Fiction of Truth: Judith Chernaik’s Mab’s Daughters ,” in Biofictions: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama , ed. Martin Middeke and Werner Huber (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999), 108.

See also Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities , 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), xii–xiii.

Bergmann, The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed , 158.

See, for instance, Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (London: The Women’s Press, 1989), 81.

Lackey, “Introduction: The Agency Aesthetics,” 8.

For a more detailed critique of Carlylean heroic discourse and its masculinism, see Ní Dhúill, Metabiography , 55–57. See also Liz Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); Jean Strouse, “Semiprivate Lives,” in Studies in Biography , ed. Daniel Aaron (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 113–29; Esther Marian, “Zum Zusammenhang von Biographie, Subjektivität und Geschlecht,” in Die Biographie—Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie , ed. Bernhard Fetz and Hannes Schweiger (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 169–98; Ann-Kathrin Reulecke, “‘Die Nase der Lady Hester’: Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Biographie und Geschlechterdifferenz,” in Biographie als Geschichte , ed. Hedwig Röckelein (Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1993), 117–42.

Virginia Woolf, “The Art of Biography,” in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (London: Hogarth, 1981), 125.

Michael Lackey, Biofiction: An Introduction (Milton: Taylor & Francis Group, 2021), 54.

Michael Lackey, interview with Ebershoff, “The Biographical Novel,” 96.

See Lackey, Biofiction , 55.

Marisol Morales-Ladrón, “Mary Morrissy’s The Rising of Bella Casey , or How Women Have Been Written Out of History,” Nordic Irish Studies 15, no. 1 (2016): 36.

Mary Morrissy, “On the Brink of the Absolutely,” interview by Loredana Salis, Studi irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies 6 (2016): 314. We came across this interview and the remarkable story behind Morrissy’s novel in Claire Palzer’s unpublished MA dissertation, which we gratefully acknowledge.

Michael Lackey, “The Bio-national Symbolism of Founding Biofictions: Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton ,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 36, no. 1, 2020: 30, https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2020.1775983 .

Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings: A Novel (London: Virago Press, 1979/2002), 122.

Ibid., 147.

Peta Bowden and Jane Mummery, Understanding Feminism (New York: Routledge, 2009), 135.

Lackey, interview with Ebershoff, “The Biographical Novel,” 96.

Chapter 2 of Hermione Lee’s Biography: A Very Short Introduction offers a historical perspective on the notion of the “exemplary life.”

Linda Wagner-Martin, Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 21. What Wagner-Martin demonstrates convincingly in this context is how popular biographies about female stars tend to focus on a woman’s love relationships and sexual exploits, thus directing attention away from her achievement and her path to stardom, which male quest plots typically outline. Ibid., 151ff.

So far, biofictions about Artemisia Gentileschi include Anna Banti’s Artemisia (1953), Alexandra Lapierre’s Artemisia: A Novel (1998), Susan Vreeland’s The Passion of Artemisia (2002), Joy McCullough’s Blood Water Paint (2018) and Linda Lafferty’s Fierce Dreamer (2020).

Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia UP, 1998), 9. For a more thorough discussion of Prosser’s argument, see Judith Halberstam, “Telling Tales: Brandon Teena, Billy Tipton, and Transgender Biography,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 15, no. 1 (2000): 62–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2000.10815235 . On the relevance of transsexual life narrative in a clinical context, see also Sandy Stone’s groundbreaking essay “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in The Transgender Studies Reader , ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 1987/2006), 221–34; and Rachel Carroll, Transgender and the Literary Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 129–31. See Annette Runte’s essay “Biographie als Patographie: Lebens- und Fallgeschichten zum Geschlechtswechsel,” in Spiegel und Maske: Konstruktionen biographischer Wahrheit , ed. Bernhard Fetz and Hannes Schweiger (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2006), 128–42—an early exploration of transgender life writing.

Jennifer Cooke, Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity , Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 137.

Quinn Eades, “Holograms, Hymens, and Horizons: A Transqueer Bodywriting,” Parallax 25, no. 2 (2019): 175, https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2019.1607234 .

Wendy Moffat, “The Narrative Case for Queer Biography,” in Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions , ed. Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2015), 219.

Donoghue, “Voicing the Nobodies,” 84.

Moffat, “Queer Biography,” 218.

Carroll, Transgender , 31.

Judith Butler, “Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7, no. 4 (2001): 621–36.

See, for instance, Carol Grant, “Regressive, Reductive and Harmful: A Trans Woman’s Take On Tom Hooper’s Embarrassing ‘Danish Girl,’” IndieWire.com , December 3, 2015, https://www.indiewire.com/2015/12/regressive-reductive-and-harmful-a-trans-womans-take-on-tom-hoopers-embarrassing-danish-girl-213499/; Nick Duffy, “Masterful but The Danish Girl Is Still Flawed,” PinkNews , January 1, 2016, https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2016/01/01/review-eddie-redmayne-is-masterful-but-the-danish-girl-is-still-flawed/; Alex von Tunzelmann, “The Danish Girl Transforms Fascinating Truths Into Tasteful, Safe Drama,” The Guardian , January 13, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/13/the-danish-girl-transforms-fascinating-truths-into-tasteful-safe-drama .

Alison Flood, “New Novel about Dr. James Barry Sparks Row over Victorian’s Gender Identity,” The Guardian , February 18, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/18/new-novel-about-dr-james-barry-sparks-row-over-victorians-gender-identity .

Ann Heilmann, Neo-/Victorian Biographilia & James Miranda Barry: A Study in Transgender & Transgenre (Cham: Palgrave, 2019), 7.

Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield,  Dr James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time (London: Oneworld, 2016 ).

For Barry as an intersex person, see Rachel Holmes, Scanty Particulars: The Scandalous Life and Astonishing Secret of Dr. James Barry, Queen Victoria’s Preeminent Military Doctor (London: Viking, 2002).

Dallas Baker, “Queer Life Writing as Self-Making,” in Offshoot: Contemporary Life Writing Methodologies and Practice , ed. Donna Lee Brien and Quinn Eades (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2018), 149.

Carroll, Transgender , 7.

Ibid., 102–03.

Richard Holmes, “The Proper Study?” in Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography , ed. Peter France and William St Clair (Oxford: OUP, 2002), 7–18.

Nicolaas A. Rupke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography . Chicago: ChicagoUniversity Press, 2008.

Some examples of such comparative metabiographical studies are Luke Ferretter on Plath biofictions (“A Fine White Flying Myth of One’s Own: Sylvia Plath in Fiction—A Review Essay,” Plath Profiles 2 [2009]: 278–98); Julia Novak on Nell Gwyn (“Nell Gwyn in Contemporary Romance Novels”), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (“The Notable Woman in Fiction: Novelistic Afterlives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1, special issue on Biographical Fiction [2016]: 83–107, https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2016.1092789 ), and Clara Wieck-Schumann (“The (Re-)Making of Clara Wieck-Schumann: Celebrity and Gender in Biofiction,” in Search for the Real: Authenticity and the Construction of Celebrity , ed. Andrew J. Sepie [Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2014], 97–112); Bethany Layne on Henry James ( Henry James in Contemporary Fiction: The Real Thing [Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020]); Monica Latham on Virginia Woolf ( Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives: The Author as Character in Contemporary Fiction and Drama [London: Routledge, 2021]). Some studies that centre on textual afterlives of one individual integrate biography and biofiction in their analyses, signalling an awareness that these two forms perform similar work with regard to cultural memory—for instance, Heilmann on James Miranda Barry ( Neo-/Victorian Biographilia ); Sarah Churchwell on Marilyn Monroe ( The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe [London: Granta, 2004]).

Ní Dhúill, Metabiography , 6.

Kohlke, “Neo-Victorian Biofiction,” 11.

See, for instance, Katerina Bryant’s recent article about her work on Loretta La Pearl, the first woman clown in America. Bryant says: “It is my role as biographer to respect these gaps, enacting a refusal to ‘pretend’ that her life has not been erased, even as I am trying to speak to and remedy this. To the reader, I will highlight these gaps as well as the way I have selected and processed archival material.” Bryant, “Speculative Biography and Countering Archival Absences of Women Clowns in the Circus,” Life Writing 18, no. 1 (2021): 34–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2021.1866777 .

On this point, see Naomi Jacobs’s chapter on “Lies, Libel, and the Truth of Fiction,” in The Character of Truth: Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990).

Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10.

Kohlke and Gutleben, “Taking Biofictional Liberties,” 3.

For a discussion of the ventriloquism metaphor in biofiction criticism, see Kohlke and Gutleben, “Taking Biofictional Liberties,” 19–22.

For a discussion of the relevance of celebrity studies to life-writing research, see Sandra Mayer and Julia Novak’s edited volume Life-Writing and Celebrity: Exploring Intersections (London: Routledge, 2019).

Halberstam, “Telling Tales,” 62.

In her monograph on Barry, Ann Heilmann discusses the questionable ethics of biofictions as occasions for scopophilic pleasure. See Heilmann, Neo-/Victorian Biographilia , 19.

On this point, see, for instance, Hermione Lee, “Am I Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in Writing the Lives of Writers , ed. Warwick Gould and Thomas F. Staley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 224–37.

Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others , 1.

Ibid., 153.

Ibid., 160.

Heilmann, Neo-/Victorian Biographilia , 175.

Ansgar Nünning proposes “fictional metabiography” and “biographic metafiction” as “two postmodernist variants of biofiction.” Nünning, “Fictional Metabiographies and Metautobiographies: Towards a Definition, Typology and Analysis of Self-Reflexive Hybrid Metagenres,” in Self-Reflexivity in Literature Text & Theorie 6, ed. Werner Huber, Martin Middeke, and Hubert Zapf (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), 202. According to his typology, fictional metabiographies “explore, revise and transform the conventions of the traditional biography …, but what they formally foreground are the problems of ‘life-writing’ and the forms of historical consciousness,” whereas biographic metafiction “explicitly thematizes and undermines the conventional boundaries between biography and fiction by deploying the devices of metafiction.” Ibid.

See Laura Savu, Postmortem Postmodernists: The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narrative (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 9.

Latham, Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives , 225.

Alpern, Sara, ed. The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women . Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

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Biography Genre Definition – Complete List of Book Genres

by Mark Malatesta | Jun 26, 2018 | Book Genres Nonfiction

Home » Book Genres Nonfiction » Biography Genre Definition – Complete List of Book Genres

Biography Genre Definition –  What’s the best definition for the biography genre? A biography is an account of a person’s life written by someone else. Biographies are true stories about real people. They are set within a real historical framework with the unique social and political conditions that existed during the subject’s life. Biographies can be about people who are alive or dead. Most often they’re about someone who was significant (popular (or unpopular) politicians and/or celebrities).

Scroll below now to see 25 biography nonfiction genre examples, or click here to see all nonfiction genres .

Biography Genre Definition – Examples

Review this list of popular examples to help you get a better understanding of the biography nonfiction genre.

1. 1776 by David McCullough

2. Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

3. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas

4. Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie

5. Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard

6. Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

7. Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera

8. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

9. John Adams by David McCullough

10. Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder

11. Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie

12. No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt by Doris Kearns Goodwin

13. Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert K. Massie

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Biopics

Introduction, general overviews.

• Special Journal Issues
• Developments in the Contemporary American Biopic
• The Biopic as International Genre
• The Biopic as a Sub-Genre of the Historical Film and in Relation to Genre Debates
• Biopic and Docudrama
• Performance and the Biopic
• Gender, Sexuality, and the Biopic
• Documentary and Experimental Biopics
• Political Figures

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• Avant-Garde and Experimental Film
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• Hollywood and Politics

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Biopics by Tom Brown , Belén Vidal LAST REVIEWED: 11 May 2023 LAST MODIFIED: 27 July 2016 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0206

“Biopic” (sometimes spelled “bio-pic”) is the most common term used to refer to films representing any aspect of the lives of famous people from the past or the present. Of unclear origins, the term seems to have originated in the trade papers and then penetrated the consciousness of producers and critics. Its widespread use has replaced the more formal “biographical picture.” Originally associated with the prestige pictures produced by the Hollywood studios during the classic era, the term has also become naturalized in the domain of British cinema (particularly with the consolidation of studies on heritage cinema). “Biopic” has also entered (not without certain resistance) the vocabulary of the study of other national cinemas, such as the French cinema. While George Custen’s 1992 study of the studio biopic established the foundations for its study as a Hollywood genre, the debates about the biopic have pursued several lines of inquiry from the start. On the one hand, the genre was perceived as a belated offspring of popular biographical formats at a time (the early 20th century) when literary biography was moving to new and experimental forms of life writing. On the other, the biopic began to be studied as a form of historical cinema, and as such it could become the target of historians’ concerns about fidelity and (mis-)representation, agency, and the ideological subtexts underpinning the retelling of history as well as the reconstruction of national narratives. The genre’s unabated popularity throughout the history of cinema has spawned attempts to classify and analyze its recurrent iconography in terms of types of biographical subjects and social worlds represented in the biopic. Likewise, the biopic’s showcase of film performance and its star-making capabilities have proved particularly fertile field of debate. So too has its biased fetishization of the great white man as the agent of history been much discussed from gender-informed perspectives. In our era of media convergence and the explosion of celebrity culture, the biopic is at the center of a new wave of scholarly interest in transmedia formats (such as the biopic/docudrama hybrids) and the possibilities opened up by a new digital culture obsessed with the self.

As a quintessentially middlebrow genre, film studies and cinephile criticism long neglected the biopic. “Low”(er) genres such as the musical, western, and so on and more highbrow “art” cinemas have been preferred over the highly conventional seriousness supposed of the biographical picture. Early journalistic overviews, such as Thomson 1977–1978 , pessimistically saw the form as increasingly a part of an impoverished culture of commodified celebrity (in contrast, perhaps, to the mystique of the studio era) but Thomas Elsaesser 1986 had much greater influence on the field with his complex ideological historicization of the key 1930s Warner Brothers cycle of films that helped lay the groundwork for later films. In France, Baldizzone 1986 proposes a general classification (a “catalogue”) of biographical subjects tackled by fiction cinema. Anderson 1988 usefully brings together a large number of films and summarizes the key dynamics of the field, but it was in 1992 that George Custen published the seminal work on the genre (at least in its studio-era formulation). Participating in the same moment that gave birth to David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s The Classical Hollywood Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), Custen 1992 examines a “purposive sample” of films in relation to strategies of studio promotion to understand the educational, ideological, and self-aggrandizing strategies embodied by the production of Hollywood biopics. Custen 2000 is an updated version of this work with a particular emphasis on post-studio era television production, but it was not until Bingham 2010 that another major monograph on the biopic would be published. Writing from the vantage point of a major resurgence of “neo-classical” biographical forms that had often performed very well at the box office and in Academy Awards, Bingham’s tacit preference is for the more experimental, auteur-driven, and independent films that developed particularly in the first decades of the 21st century. Vidal 2014 brings the debates up to date and departs from the other work compiled in this section by not focusing solely on Hollywood but also on the international “life” of the biopic, while Cheshire 2015 (the most recent monograph on the biopic at the time of writing) draws mainly on journalistic reception of the genre.

Anderson, Carolyn. “Biographical Film.” In A Handbook of American Film Genres . Edited by Wes D. Gehring, 331–351. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988.

Based on survey of two hundred films produced 1929–1986, this chapter can claim to be one of the first broad surveys of the genre in Hollywood and comments on the then-available scholarship. Notes development of more experimental film biopics as well as growth of highly conventional tele-film examples.

Baldizzone, José. “Esquisse d’un catalogue des biographies cinématographiques.” In Special Issue: The Cinema of Great Men . Edited by Pierre Guibbert. Les Cahiers de la Cinémathèque 45 (May 1986): 13–21.

One of the first attempts at generic classification of biographical fiction films by type of subject and corresponding themes. Baldizzone claims that full-fledged film biographies are still rare, with historical figures serving, more often than not, to reinforce the reality effect of historical cinema rather than taking center stage—a view subsequently challenged. Contains international filmography. In French.

Bingham, Dennis. Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre . Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010.

With Custen 1992 , this is the major monograph on the genre. Focused on Hollywood cinema, tracing genre’s genesis through the classical period but main focus is the post-classical, with particular emphasis on the development toward more innovative films. Part 1 of the book examines “great (white) man” biopics; the second half of the book being devoted to female biopics.

Cheshire, Ellen. Bio-Pics. A Life in Pictures . New York: Wallflower, 2015.

Short monograph on the biopic as a contemporary film genre, covering popular English-language films from the 1990s and 2000s. Each chapter reviews key films and contains a further viewing list. The book draws mostly on journalistic sources, thus focusing on the way recent biopics have been received in the media.

Custen, George F. Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed History . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Seminal first book-length history of the genre. Custen draws upon Leo Lowenthal’s 1944 categories “idols of production” versus “idols of consumption” (“The Triumph of Mass Idols.” In Literature, Popular Culture and Society . Repr. By Leo Lowenthal, 109–140. Palo Alto, CA Pacific, 1961) to chart the development of studio-era Hollywood’s choice of biographical subjects 1927–1960. The book focuses on production context and promotion as much as on film style and reflects on its own methodology including the use of a “purposive sample” of films.

Custen, George F. “The Mechanical Life in the Age of Human Reproduction: American Biopics, 1961–1980.” Special Issue: Biopic . Edited by Glenn Man. Biography 23.1 (2000): 127–159.

DOI: 10.1353/bio.1999.0010

Something of an afterword to Custen 1992 , focusing on the post-studio years and the increased importance of television as a site for biopic production. Like his 1992 book, it contains useful tables of biographical subjects by profession.

Elsaesser, Thomas. “Film History and Social History: The Dieterle/Warner Brothers Bio-Pic.” Wide Angle 8.2 (1986): 15–31.

Much cited early scholarly essay on the genre. Concerned with classical Hollywood, with particular focus on one major 1930s cycle. Considers the ideological work of the classical biopic broadly as social history and in terms of the studio’s manufacturing of a cultured image. Extended analysis of scenes of heroes surrounded by crowds.

Thomson, David. “The Invasion of the ‘Real’ People.” Sight and Sound 47.1 (Winter 1977–1978): 18–22.

Discusses screen production since the 1930s but places particular emphasis on recent (1970s) film and television narratives based on real people. Pessimistically sees genre as part of trajectory toward impoverishment of the real and commodification of our own lives.

Vidal, Belén. “Introduction: The Biopic and its Critical Contexts.” In The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture . Edited by Tom Brown and Belén Vidal, 1–32. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Offers broad critical history of the biopic traced through discussions of classical Hollywood, relationships with literary biography, theories of performance and embodiment, theories of film genre and hybridity, and in context of discussions of more recent media convergence. Vidal also reflects on poor critical reputation in combination with genre’s considerable middlebrow kudos.

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