Outsider Biographies

Savage, de Sade, Wainewright, Ned Kelly, Billy the Kid, Rimbaud and Genet: Base Crime and High Art in Biography and Bio-Fiction, 1744-2000
Erscheinungsjahr 2014
ISBN: 978-90-420-3875-2
Verlag: Brill | Rodopi

Buch, Englisch, Band 75, 8 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 552 g

Reihe: Textxet: Studies in Comparative Literature

Concerning itself with biography and bio-fiction written in English and in French and also taking in American and Australian subjects, Outsider Biographies focuses on writers who have a criminal record and on notorious criminals who authors of bio-fiction consider as writers. It pursues an understanding of the formal effects of life-writers’ struggles between championing their subjects and a deep ambivalence towards their subjects’ crimes. The book analyses the challenge that these literary outsiders present to the mainstream French- and English-language traditions where many biographers assign merit to productive lives well lived. The book’s approach illuminates both differences in those traditions from the mid-eighteenth, to the twenty-first century and a convergence between them, evident in the experimental-cum-fictional devices in recent English-language biography. Outsider Biographies advances wide-ranging new interpretations of the biographical writing on each of its seven subjects, but does so in a way that invites the reader picking up the book out of a passion for just one of those subjects, to follow the thread onto another and yet another.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements and Dedication
Introduction: Outsider Biography: Definitions and Corpus

Part One: Richard Savage 1698-1743
1. Partial Biographies by Samuel Johnson and Richard Holmes

Part Two: Le Marquis De Sade 1740-1814
2. De Sade According to Sainte-Beuve, Apollinaire, Lely and Lever
3. Barthes’ and Pauvert’s Questioning of De Sade Biography

Part Three: Outlaws in Fictional Biography
4. An Outlaw in Fictional Biography: Andrew Motion’s Thomas Griffiths Wainewright 1794-1847
5. An Outlaw in Fictional Biography: Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly 1855-1880
6. An Outlaw in Fictional Biography: Michael Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid 1859-1881

Part Four: Arthur Rimbaud 1854-1891
7. ‘Family Biographies’ of Rimbaud, Followed by Scepticism and Anti-biography
8. Arthur Rimbaud: Steinmetz’s Biography and Michon’s Biographical Fiction

Part Five: Jean Genet 1910-1986
9. Jean Genet: Biography and Saint Genet
10. Jean Genet: Biography after Saint Genet

Conclusions: The Outsider’s Solitude

Bibliography
Index