Joanna Scott and the Biofictional Art of Educating the Eyes

Abstract

© 2022 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System iofiction is literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure. While writers have been authoring biographical novels for more than two hundred years, it was only in the late 1980s that it became a dominant literary form, resulting in stellar publications from luminaries such as Gabriel García Márquez, J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Charles Johnson, Joyce Carol Oates, Mario Vargas Llosa, Peter Carey, Olga Tokarczuk, and Hilary Mantel, to mention a notable few. 1 Yet many have been extremely critical of the aesthetic form. For instance, in The Historical Novel Georg Lukács condemns the biographical novel as an irredeemable aesthetic form because it necessarily distorts and misrepresents history.2 In this same tradition are Lucien Febvre, a French historian and one of the founders of the Annales School of History who faulted the biographical novel in 1938 because it is loaded with “blunders, mixups and gaffes” (7), and Carl