[Commlist] CFP: Authors as Characters in Fiction and Film

*Call For Chapters*

**

We are putting together a book proposal which will soon be submitted to 
Bloomsbury, under the provisional title /Authors as Characters in 
Fiction and Film/. We are seeking chapter proposals to complete an 
already substantial table of contents.

The volume will be edited by Nathalie Collé, Monica Latham, William 
McKenzie and Matthew Smith.

*Submission Guidelines:* Please submit your chapter proposals (which 
should include the title of the paper, author(s), a 250-300-word 
abstract, institutional affiliation, contact information and a short 
bio-bibliography) *before 15 February 2025*, to the following address: 
(idea-authors-as-characters-contact /at/ univ-lorraine.fr) 
<http://(idea-authors-as-characters-contact /at/ univ-lorraine.fr)>

Provisional acceptance (pending Bloomsbury’s own double blind review 
process) will be notified by *1 March 2025 *and full chapters, which 
should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words (including footnotes and 
bibliography), should be submitted for *15 July 2025*. Bloomsbury 
guidelines on style should be respected and are available here:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/media/qufna2uj/ba-house-style-for-authors-and-editorssept16.pdf 
<https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/discover/bloomsbury-academic/authors/style-guidelines/>

Contributions which *simultaneously address the fields of biofiction 
_and_ biopics* are particularly welcome.

The existing planned table of contents (by alphabetical order in this 
draft version) is below. The third column of the table specifies corpus 
material (where the information is available) if this does not appear in 
the draft chapter title, as this will be of help in avoiding submitting 
abstracts for fields that are already covered.

Kathie Birat, Université de Lorraine

	

‘“It’s the territory that’s important”: Caryl Phillips’s Fictional 
Representation of Jean Rhys in A/View of the Empire at Sunset/’

	

Antonella Braida, Université de Lorraine

	

‘Mary Shelley as Character in Contemporary Fiction and Drama: Feminist 
and Remedial Rewritings’

	

Shelley Jackson/, Patchwork Girl/; Liz Lochhead, /Blood //and Ice/; 
Debora Clair, /Conception/

Tom Brown, King’s College London

	

‘Author-Biopics in Classical Hollywood: Gender, Agency and Labour’

	

/The Life of Emile Zola /(1937); /The Adventures of Mark Twain /(1944)

Laura Cernat, KU Leuven

	

‘From Vertigo to Nostalgia: Five Phases of Author Revival Biofiction’

	

Jean-Marie Lecomte, Université de Lorraine

	

‘A Film History of Lives of Poets on Screen: Film Form and Cultural Context’

	

/If I Were a King/ (1920); /The Beloved Rogue/ (1927); /The Vagabond 
King/" (1930)

Camille Martin-Payre, Université de Tours

	

Wildean biopics

	

Will McKenzie, Université Catholique de l’Ouest

	

‘Writing in Will’s Name: Characterising and Charactering Shakespeare in 
/Hamnet/: /A Novel of the Plague/ by Maggie O’Farrell and Shakespeare’s 
Sonnets 135 and 136’

	

Doriane Nemes, Université de Lorraine

	

‘Oscar as Forgery of Wilde? Biofiction and the Truth of Masks’

	

Peter Ackroyd, /The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde /(1983), Rohase 
Piercy, /The Coward Does It With A Kiss /(1990), Robert Holloway, /The 
Unauthorized Letters of Oscar Wilde/ (1997), Louis Edwards, /Oscar Wilde 
Discovers America/ (2003) Merlin Holland, /Coffee with Oscar Wilde/ (2007)

Armelle Parey, Université de Caen Normandie

	

‘“Find your own voice, Mary”: Haïfaa Al-Mansour’s /Mary Shelley/ (2017) 
as Neo-Romantic Biopic?’

	

Anne-Laure Rigeade, Université Paris-Est Créteil

	

‘What is an Author-Character? The Case of Virginia Woolf in 
French-Language Biofiction’

	

Matthew Smith, Université de Lorraine

	

‘Postmodern Fantasy or Reverse-Engineering the Authentic in Biofiction 
and Biopics: The Cases of Stephanie Barron’s /Jane Austen Mystery 
Series/ and Julian Jarrold’s /Becoming Jane/ (2007)’

	

The great paradox of the modern age appears to be that, since Roland 
Barthes announced the ‘death of the Author’, there has never been so 
much fascination or indeed obsession with authorial figures, tangible in 
fiction and film. The aim of this publication is to understand the 
fetishisation of English-speaking canonical authors (such as William 
Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Henry 
James, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Sylvia Plath, Mary Shelley, D. H. 
Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway), the ‘versioning’ 
(Silver xvi) of their texts and images, the fabrication of myths which 
are ‘endlessly repeated and woven into culture’ (Miller xiii), the 
relationship between auctoriality and celebrity, and artistic and 
historiographic representations. The most recent contributions to the 
field have been, respectively, Paul Franssen and Ton Hoenselaars’s /The 
Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western 
Literature/ (1999), Hila Shachar’s /Screening the Author: The Literary 
Biopic /(2019) and Bethany Layne’s /T//he Author as Character: 
Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature/ (2020). However, 
much work remains to be done on the sub-genre that is the literary 
biopic, and the production of biofiction and biopics has continued apace 
over recent decades producing ever more material to be examined. What is 
more, concerning the issue of pre-postmodern productions of this type, 
including in the classic age of cinema, the surface has barely been 
scratched.


The volume seeks to explore two main generic perspectives, and ideally 
simultaneously:

*Biofiction*. According to Michael Lackey’s widely accepted definition, 
biofiction is ‘literature that names its protagonist after an actual 
biographical figure’ (2016) and takes advantage of the writing 
techniques of the novel to present the ‘evidence-based discourse of 
biography’ (Lodge, 2014). It is a genre which ‘has become a very 
fashionable form of literary fiction’ (Lodge, 2014) in the last decades, 
and in recent years has become the subject of Biofiction Studies, a 
dynamic scholarly discipline that has ‘finally emancipated itself from 
both historical fiction and life writing and has chartered a narrative 
space uniquely its own’ (Lackey, 2017). More specific concepts indicate 
that critics have chiselled the features of the genre even more finely 
to suggest that it is precisely the figure of an author who becomes a 
character in fiction, leading to the notion of ‘author fiction’ 
(Fokkema, 1999; Savu, 2009), or the genre of ‘author as character’ 
(Franssen and Hoenselaars, 1999). Contemporary biofictionalists 
reimagine writers at work, deploy the subjects-writers’ own literary 
techniques and reproduce their stylistic signature: literary biofiction 
is therefore an imaginative appropriation of the literature as well as 
of the life of a past iconic writer.

*Biopics*. According to Tom Brown and Belén Vidal, a biopic is ‘a 
fiction film that deals with a figure whose existence is documented in 
history, and whose claims to fame or notoriety warrant the uniqueness of 
his or her story’ (2014). A biopic uses both historical facts and the 
screenwriter’s imagination to depict memorable scenes in the lives of 
famous historical figures; it is very much in keeping with today’s 
celebrity culture. The genesis and plot of the writer-character’s books 
are often woven into the cinematographic narratives of their lives. In 
this case, biopics raise a specific challenge: how can the writer’s 
prose be translated or adapted into moving images in a way that is 
entertaining to watch, while at the same time rendering the style of the 
writer portrayed in the film? Scholarship on writers’ biopics (Buchanan, 
Frus, Henke, Jardonnet, and Wilson) has mainly examined the intermedial 
relationship between the author’s writing and the film narrative, as 
well as intertextual allusions to the writer’s life and oeuvre that are 
inserted in the biopic’s plot. Other scholars (Stetz, 2000) propose an 
altogether different approach by focusing not on the literariness but on 
the social and political status of the writer as a disruptive social 
force and critic of their own time; they examine the biopic’s 
appropriation of the writer to make a transhistorical commentary on 
current contemporary issues.

Contributors are invited to consider particular case studies and may 
address the following general questions:

  * Why are some authors depicted more frequently than others in
    biofictions, biopics and graphic novels, and how are these authorial
    figures represented remembered and commemorated today?
  * How is the life of an author represented? Is it romanticised,
    dramatised, or Hollywood-ised? What specific moments of their life
    are selected and why? Which well-known events and (sometimes)
    stereotyped images are used by contemporary authors to portray their
    characters? What versions or interpretations of these authors
    survive and are ingrained in our cultural memory? How do these
    representations contribute to reinforcing an author’s iconic status,
    cultural image and literary reputation?
  * Which features (of the author and their work) are consumed by the
    general public and spread in popular culture? Are these ‘popular’
    texts and visual representations a convenient entry-point into
    highbrow literature?
  * How are the original writing styles of the canonical authors 
transposed?
  * How does ideology influence the adaptation and appropriation of a
    canonical author’s life and oeuvre? How do the portraits of authors
    in fiction reflect both scholarly receptions and societal developments?
  * To take the example of biopics, these have existed in fact since the
    very beginnings of cinema itself. In what way has the genre evolved
    over time and to what extent is there (or not) a privileged
    relationship between postmodernism and the biopic? Can the same
    question be raised concerning biofiction?


This publication fosters a dialogue between different approaches and 
fields: literarity, cultural studies, film studies, transmediality and 
visual culture. We would like the book chapters to address the topic of 
authors as characters in fiction, film from the perspectives of 
production and reception. Lucasta Miller defined ‘afterlife studies’ as 
‘a form of critical enquiry which can interrogate the intersection 
between real lives and their cultural construction, both within the 
lifetime of the subject and posthumously’ (2014). The current abundance 
of author-as-character productions provides an opportunity to redefine 
the emerging critical concept of ‘literary afterlives’ as past authorial 
figures continue to be transposed to new literary, visual and cultural 
contexts, and their past oeuvres are repurposed to be consumed by new 
audiences. The continuous reinvention of authors as characters in 
fiction, film and graphic narratives reinforces their canonical literary 
status, rejuvenates critical interpretations and augments their cultural 
capital in the twenty-first century.


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