Creative Nonfiction and the Lyric Essay

This chapter is devoted to writing which falls under a recent, nearly paradoxical coinage: ‘creative nonfiction’, a phrase which raises the fundamental theoretical questions asked by Lukács and Adorno about whether the essay is better seen as art or knowledge. Stuckey-French examines both the rise of this category in creative writing programmes in universities in the United States, and the arguments of the influential theorist and anthologist of the essay John d’Agata, who rejects ‘creative nonfiction’ in favour of the ‘lyric essay’. Stuckey-French then shows how the contemporary essayists Jo Ann Beard, Eula Biss, and Claudia Rankine are both preoccupied by the boundary between fiction and reality, and often transgress it without minimizing its ethical and political significance, in respect of childhood memory, violence, or race.