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<div><strong>Postmodernist Biofiction: A one-day conference at the University of Reading on 25th March 2017
</strong></div>
<div><strong></strong> </div>
<div><strong>Keynote speakers: Maggie Gee, author of Virginia Woolf in Manhattan , and Susan Sellers, author of Vanessa and Virginia.
</strong></div>
<div> </div>
<div>Biographical fiction, or biofiction, is an increasingly popular subgenre of the contemporary novel, with writers’ lives attracting particular attention. David Lodge defines biofiction as ‘a novel which takes a real person and their real history as the
subject matter for imaginative exploration, using the novel’s techniques for representing subjectivity rather than the objective, evidence-based discourse of biography’. Biofiction is also distinguishable by its use of the subject’s real name. This real-world
proper noun situates biofiction on the ontological frontier between biography and fiction, and distinguishes the genre from the more numerous, but less explicit, engagements of roman-à-clef.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Practitioners, students, and scholars of biofiction are warmly invited to the University of Reading for a day of informal conversations about this exciting sub-genre. We are especially (but not exclusively) interested in discussing the postmodernity of
biofiction, both in terms of its modernist subjects and postmodern narrative strategies.</div>
<div>Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:</div>
<div> </div>
<div>· The origins of biofiction: what cultural conditions enabled the evolution of the genre?</div>
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<div>· The ethics of biofiction: how much invention is legitimate?</div>
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<div>· The peculiarities of writing the lives of writers: how far does the work inform the life? Why have certain writers attracted so much attention?</div>
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<div>· Biofiction’s envisaged audience: how far does it depend on readers’ prior knowledge of the subject?</div>
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<div>· The discursive nature of biofiction: how far does biofiction engage with the historical subject, how far with a textual construct?</div>
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<div>· The (im)possibility of life writing: biofiction’s relationship with biography, autobiography, memoir, and creative non-fiction</div>
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<div>· Biofiction as a form of adaptation, appropriation, and/or literary criticism</div>
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<div>· Biofiction’s relationship with the literary biopic</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Please send 300-500-word proposals for twenty-minute papers or three-paper panels to
<a href="mailto:postmodernistbiofiction@gmail.com"><font color="#0066cc">postmodernistbiofiction@gmail.com</font></a> by 24th January 2017.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Please send enquiries to Bethany Layne (<a href="mailto:b.layne@reading.ac.uk"><font color="#0066cc">b.layne@reading.ac.uk</font></a>) or Madeleine Davies (<a href="mailto:m.k.davies@reading.ac.uk"><font color="#0066cc">m.k.davies@reading.ac.uk</font></a>).
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<div> </div>
<div>Registration fees: £30 standard / £15 unwaged; free to Reading University students
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