Taking Biofictional Liberties: Tactical Games and Gambits with Nineteenth-Century Lives

Marie-Luise Kohlke; Christian Gutleben

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Taking Biofictional Liberties: Tactical Games and Gambits with Nineteenth-Century Lives

In: Neo-Victorian Biofiction

Authors:

Marie-Luise Kohlke

Marie-Luise Kohlke
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Christian Gutleben

Christian Gutleben
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 1–53

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004434356_002

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Abstract

This chapter explores neo-Victorian biofiction’s oxymoronic yoking together of the real and the imaginary, biographical fact and fiction. The works under consideration mingle art and archive, mimetically foregrounding seemingly contradictory concretions like creative facts, fictional truths, and poetic truthfulness. Starting with the question of past referentiality, always impossible to grasp in its totality, we define the biofictional subject as a hybrid object of research, a field of investigation in which imagination must per force complement the lacunae of historical epistemology. Neo-Victorian biofiction’s focus on the historical Other generates an affective proximity, which in turn creates ethical ambiguity, as the present-day addressee becomes either an indispensable witness or a redundant trauma tourist. The convergence of empathy with exposure, or emotional closeness with critical distance, instantiates a dialectic tension rather than a dualistic opposition, promoting a postmodernist hermeneutics that privileges suspicion and revisionism. Yet in the hesitation between authenticity and simulacrum, the ethical thrust is never forsaken entirely, as neo-Victorian biofiction deconstructs nineteenth-century master-narratives to enact a democratic rehabilitation of overlooked lives as well as resurrecting their celebrity counterparts.

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Neo-Victorian Biofiction

Reimagining Nineteenth-Century Historical Subjects

Series: Neo-Victorian Series, Volume: 6 and Neo-Victorian Series Online

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004434356

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 04 Sep 2020

Subjects
- Literature and Cultural Studies

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Taking Biofictional Liberties: Tactical Games and Gambits with Nineteenth-Century Lives

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Neo-Victorian Biofiction

Reimagining Nineteenth-Century Historical Subjects

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