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'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.' (Publication summary)
Contents
- An Outlaw in Fictional Biography : Peter Carey's Ned Kelly 1855-1880, single work criticism (p. 151-178)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Reviewed Work : Outsider Biographies
2016
single work
review
— Appears in: Modern Language Review , April vol. 111 no. 2 2016; (p. 535-536)
— Review of 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 2014 multi chapter work criticism
-
Reviewed Work : Outsider Biographies
2016
single work
review
— Appears in: Modern Language Review , April vol. 111 no. 2 2016; (p. 535-536)
— Review of 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 2014 multi chapter work criticism