FEMINIST TO POSTFEMINIST: contemporary biofictions by and about women artists. Issue 1 (2nd January 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Novak, Julia
• Is Part Of: Angelaki. Volume 22:Issue 1(2017)
• Page Start: 223
• Page End: 230
• Publication Date: 2017-01-02
• Subjects: biofiction -- biographical novel -- historical romance novel -- feminist biography -- metabiography -- Priya Parmar -- Janice Galloway; Literature -- Criticism and interpretation -- Periodicals; Philosophy -- Periodicals; Political science -- Periodicals; 100
• DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2017.1286090
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0969-725X

Abstract

Abstract: Biographical novels about historical women artists have been experiencing a veritable boom in recent years. Written mostly by women, they can be understood as women authors' attempts to reach out across time (and often, space) to other "artistic" women whose lives "speak to us" today. It has long been a key insight of historical fiction research that a historical novel reveals more about the time in which it was written than the time in which it is set. As such, it can be assumed that contemporary novels about historical women speak as much to twenty-first-century conceptions of femininity as to particular historical moments of female subjectivity. This paper will compare two novels about historical women artists: Janice Galloway's Clara (2002) about nineteenth-century German pianist Clara Wieck-Schumann and Priya Parmar's Exit the Actress (2011) about Restoration actress Nell Gwyn. While based on historical facts, both these novels use the greater freedom of fiction to depart from biographical conventions. It will be demonstrated that although they resemble each other on the discourse level, employing shifts in the narrative perspective, conspicuous typography, and graphic elements, they differ markedly in the biographical and fictional subgenres in which they participate and, hence, in their gender politics.