{"title":"Voicing Female Power through Biofiction: A Conversation with Mary Sharratt","authors":"Michael Lackey","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2023.2192612","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2023.2192612","url":null,"abstract":"Mary Sharratt, the author of eight critically acclaimed novels, is on a mission to write strong women back into history. Her novels include Daughters of the Witching Hill, Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen (winner of the Nautilus Book Award), The Dark Lady’s Mask: A Novel of Shakespeare’s Muse, and Ecstasy, about the life, loves, and music of Alma Mahler. Sharratt’s articles and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Publishers Weekly, Enchanted Living, Lit Hub, Minnesota Magazine, and Historical Novels Review.","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"182 1","pages":"25 - 38"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83553553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Klaus Mann, Music, and the Art of Transformation in Biofiction","authors":"M. Rensen","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2023.2192048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2023.2192048","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In Symphonie Pathétique (1935) Klaus Mann takes readers into the heart and soul of the famous composer Tchaikovsky. He makes them understand the hardship Tchaikovsky endured as a queer, European-minded composer in Russia’s musical world in the nineteenth century, which is dominated by national thought. Tapping into the transcendent power of music, Mann counters the national frame by highlighting fertile transnational connections in the life and music of his protagonist. As such, the novel is a critical response to the nationalist Nazi-Germany he fled in 1933.","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"216 1","pages":"55 - 81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77407473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Biographical Novelist as an Agent of Pain: A Conversation with Daniel Kehlmann","authors":"Michael Lackey","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2023.2192592","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2023.2192592","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"16 1","pages":"9 - 24"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77488998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nonpolitical Mann? Faustian Bargains and False Romanticism in Colm Tóibín’s The Magician","authors":"V. Rademacher","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2023.2191537","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2023.2191537","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay explores how Colm Toíbín’s biographical novel The Magician, alongside Thomas Mann’s own writings, exposes contradictions in Mann’s definition of “nonpolitical,” the relationship to today’s culture wars, the risks of virtue signaling and cancel culture, and the Faustian bargain of literary fame and external validation versus empathy and real human connection. Building on her study, Derivative Lives: Biofiction, Uncertainty, and Speculative Risk in Contemporary Spanish Narrative, Rademacher argues that what biofiction does especially well is to illuminate powerful spaces of uncertainty. Such gaps of knowledge and “not seeing” are not internalized, apolitical actions, but expose unsettled, contentious questions that continue to act on our lives. Within this framework, it is fear of and retreat from the uncertain that complicates Mann’s thinking and fiction. Toíbín’s novel exposes how Thomas Mann internalized a false Romanticism that rationalized personal and political forms of detachment and disengagement. In turn, the biofiction reveals how individuals become lost when they use imagination not as a means of contesting reality to understand the always incomplete and evolving nature of the human condition, but in order to conceal or evade this inquiry—deepening deceptive fictions.","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"52 1","pages":"83 - 107"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88420531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Refashioning Diary Studies: The Tradition of Black Women’s Diaries","authors":"P. Smith","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2022.2135892","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2135892","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract To read Black women’s diaries as a distinct literary tradition—a project grounded by work in feminist and African American studies—is to gain new perspectives on the diary itself. Diaries piece together narrative fragments to configure interiority, weave change into history, and speak in code to multiple audiences.","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":"189 - 210"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73832338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Of Edible Grandmothers, Culinary Cosmopolitanisms, and Casteized Domesticities: The Contradictory Ideologies of Shoba Narayan’s Food Memoir Monsoon Diary","authors":"Nandini Dhar","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2022.2127285","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2127285","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay analyses Indian-Tamil food memoirist Shoba Narayan’s memoir, Monsoon Diary (2003), arguing that the Indian diasporic feminized food-memoir is a crucial site through which to interrogate the class aspirations of a “new” globalized Indian elite. Narayan’s text was one of the first Indian diasporic food memoirs to be published in the early years of the twenty-first century, and played a decisive role in popularizing the genre of the feminized Indian food memoir. Switching between her life-story and recipes of everyday South Indian home-cooked fare, Narayan established a new hybrid genre within the cultural field of Indian Anglophone life-writing.","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"2013 1","pages":"247 - 288"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86474035","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"No Apologies: Jenny Diski’s Apology for the Woman Writing as Fictional Memoir","authors":"G. Bayer","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2022.2135342","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2135342","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay argues that Jenny Diski’s final novel, Apology for the Woman Writing, adds to the understanding of Diski’s view on literature and the arts, thus complementing her nonfiction writing. Drawing on notions of survival and the Freudian uncanny, the essay shows how the relationships between Michel de Montaigne and Marie de Gournay and between De Gournay and her servant Jamyn are built around notions of affective engagement, where the intellectual labor of writing conjoins physical experiences of excitement. Such a view of literature as affect is then directly connected to the force of a text to survive.","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"15 1","pages":"289 - 307"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74387147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rev. of Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Caribbean Life Writing","authors":"Lindsay D. Peart","doi":"10.1080/08989575.2022.2123595","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2123595","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37895,"journal":{"name":"a/b: Auto/Biography Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"592 - 594"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85504990","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}