Introduction to biofiction. History and biography by the modern Italian writers

Abstract

The article highlights the specific features of the hybrid genre of biographical writing (also known as «fictional biography»), which has been theorized since the 1990s in France. The biographical novel is a fictional work about a real-life person with elements of authorial fiction. On the textual level, the subject of “hybridization” in biofiction can be both the content plan (speculation of events built around the documentary basis) and the form plan (use of indirect speech, stream of consciousness, insertion of other people’s text, etc.).

At the pragmatic level, there is a breakdown of the traditional relationship between reader and text, as information recognized by the reader as fiction is presented as a biographical fact. The article also maps out a circle of questions for researchers and literary critics to address, in particular, the issue of genre boundaries and the development of terminology, the issue of the relationship between a character of biofiction and his historical prototype, the issue of relationship between an author and his work, the issue of the influence of new cultural and media factors on genres of biographical writing.