Outsider biographies : : Savage, de Sade, Wainewright, Ned Kelly, Billy the Kid, Rimbaud and Genet: base crime and high art in biography and bio-fiction, 1744-2000 / / Ian H. Magedera.

• Superior document: Textxet. Studies in Comparative Literature ; 75
• VerfasserIn: Magedera, Ian H.,
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam, Netherlands ;, New York : : Rodopi,, 2014.; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: Text (Rodopi (Firm)) ; 75.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (352 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

Concerning itself with biography and bio-fiction written in English and in French and also taking in American and Australian subjects, Outsider Biographies focuses on writers who have a criminal record and on notorious criminals who authors of bio-fiction consider as writers. It pursues an understanding of the formal effects of life-writers’ struggles between championing their subjects and a deep ambivalence towards their subjects’ crimes. The book analyses the challenge that these literary outsiders present to the mainstream French- and English-language traditions where many biographers assign merit to productive lives well lived. The book’s approach illuminates both differences in those traditions from the mid-eighteenth, to the twenty-first century and a convergence between them, evident in the experimental-cum-fictional devices in recent English-language biography. Outsider Biographies advances wide-ranging new interpretations of the biographical writing on each of its seven subjects, but does so in a way that invites the reader picking up the book out of a passion for just one of those subjects, to follow the thread onto another and yet another.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- OUTSIDER BIOGRAPHY: DEFINITIONS AND CORPUS -- PARTIAL BIOGRAPHIES BY SAMUEL JOHNSON AND RICHARD HOLMES -- DE SADE ACCORDING TO SAINTE-BEUVE, APOLLINAIRE, LELY AND LEVER -- BARTHES’ AND PAUVERT’S QUESTIONING OF DE SADE BIOGRAPHY -- AN OUTLAW IN FICTIONAL BIOGRAPHY: ANDREW MOTION’S THOMAS GRIFFITHS WAINEWRIGHT 1794-1847 -- AN OUTLAW IN FICTIONAL BIOGRAPHY: PETER CAREY’S NED KELLY 1855-1880 -- AN OUTLAW IN FICTIONAL BIOGRAPHY: MICHAEL ONDAATJE’S BILLY THE KID 1859-1881 -- ‘FAMILY BIOGRAPHIES’ OF RIMBAUD, FOLLOWED BY SCEPTICISM AND ANTI-BIOGRAPHY -- ARTHUR RIMBAUD: STEINMETZ’S BIOGRAPHY AND MICHON’S BIOGRAPHICAL FICTION -- JEAN GENET: BIOGRAPHY AND SAINT GENET -- JEAN GENET: BIOGRAPHY AFTER SAINT GENET -- THE OUTSIDER’S SOLITUDE -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX.