Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction

“This absorbing book makes a rich intervention into historical fi ction, life-writing, and feminist and queer cultural history.” —Ann Heilmann, author of Neo-Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry: A Study in Transgender and Transgenre (2018)

“A fascinating exploration of the intimate interaction of gendered history and biographical fi ction [...] intelligently and incisively interrogates the deliberate use of fi ction to recentre marginalized female historical fi gures.” —Farah Mendlesohn, author of Creating Memory: Historical Fiction and the English Civil Wars (2022) 

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction addresses the current boom in biographical fictions across the globe, examining the ways in which gendered lives of the past become re-imagined as gendered narratives in fiction. It addresses questions of gender in a sustained and systematic manner that is sensitive to cultural and historical differences in both raw material and fictional reworking. It draws on theories of biofiction and historical fiction, life-writing studies, feminist criticism, queer feminist readings, postcolonial studies, feminist art history, and trans studies. Attentive to various approaches to fictionalisation that reclaim, appropriate or re-invent their ‘raw material’, the volume assesses the critical, revisionist and deconstructive potential of biographical fictions while acknowledging the effects of cliché, gender norms and established narratives in many of the texts under investigation.


The introduction of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com 



​Caitríona Ní Dhúill is Professor in German at University College Cork, Ireland. She is the author of Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Sex in Imagined Spaces: Gender and Utopia from More to Bloch (2010). She is co-editor of the journal Austrian Studies, and guest co-editor of a double special issue of Poetics Today (2016) on negative futures. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on gender theory, utopian theory, modernist literature and life writing.                                                 



Julia Novak is an Elise Richter Research Fellow (Austrian Science Fund) at the Department of English, University of Salzburg, Austria, and an editor of the European Journal of Life Writing. She has published two monographs: a book on reading groups, Gemeinsam Lesen (2007) and another titled Live Poetry: An Integrated Approach to Poetry in Performance (2011). She also co-edited the volume Experiments in Life Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography andFiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.