Browsing by Author "Layne, Bethany"
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Item Embargo The Anchored Imagination of the Biographical Novel(Bloomsbury, 2018-10) Layne, Bethany; Toibin, C.Item Open Access BBC’s adaptation of Malory Towers reveals more about the period and its diversity than Blyton’s book(The Conversation UK, 2020-04-15) Layne, BethanyItem Open Access Biofiction and the Paratext: Troubling Claims to Truth(Southern Connecticut State University, 2018) Layne, BethanyItem Metadata only Biofiction and Writers' Afterlives(Cambridge Scholars, 2020-07-01) Layne, BethanyItem Embargo The Bionovel as a Hybrid Genre(Bloomsbury, 2018-10) Layne, BethanyItem Embargo Colm Toibin: The Anchored Imagination of the Biographical Novel(Irish-American Cultural Institute, 2018) Layne, BethanyItem Open Access ‘Full cause of weeping’: Affective Failure in The Queen (2006) and The Crown (2019)(University of Groningen Press, 2021-09-08) Layne, BethanyThis article reads The Crown, Series Three, Episode Three, ‘Aberfan’, as an adaptation of The Queen, both of which were written by Peter Morgan. Each focuses on a crisis in public relations emerging from Elizabeth II’s delayed reaction to a tragedy: the mining disaster in The Crown and the death of Princess Diana in The Queen. Both are double portraits, in which the monarch’s affective failure is contrasted with the more humane response of the prime minister, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair respectively. And both texts explore the tension between private grief and public performance. By reading these texts in dialogue, their relevance to their contemporary contexts is magnified. The Queen uses Elizabeth II’s nadir in public relations to comment on Blair’s fall from grace as a result of the Iraq War, while ‘Aberfan’, by emphasising the avoidable nature of the disaster, comments on the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017. While neither text shrinks from criticising the monarch for her breakdown in empathy, the resonances between Aberfan and Grenfell allow the Queen’s immediate and humane response in 2017 to redeem her delayed reactions in the past. This demonstrates the capacity of fictional texts to intervene in the popular perception of their subjects.Item Embargo Great Poets Do Not Die: Maggie Gee's Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2014) as Metaphor for Contemporary Biofiction(Edinburgh University Press, 2021-03) Layne, BethanyThis chapter takes as its subject Maggie Gee’s novel Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2014), which imagines what might transpire if Woolf were to be resurrected in twenty-&rst-century New York. She is conjured by the &ctitious novelist Angela Lamb, who is visiting the Berg Collection in preparation for a keynote address at an international Woolf conference. As a contemporary novelist who recalls her subject to life, lends her clothing and helps her to sign her name, Angela is symbolic of the real-life novelists who recreated Woolf in their own image and reinterpreted her works in line with their respective versions. The chapter thus contends that Gee’s recent manifestation of Woolf-inspired bio&ction may be read successfully as an extended metaphor for the twenty-year-old subgenre. This originated with Sigrid Nunez (1998) and Michael Cunningham (1998), and extends to recent work by Priya Parmar (2014) and Norah Vincent (2015). The chapter &rst examines issues of content, focusing on Gee’s presentation of Woolf’s suicide and sexuality. The discussion is then expanded to think critically about Woolf-inspired bio&ction as a subgenre, particularly the ethical issues attendant on its invasion of the subject’s privacy.Item Open Access The Haunting of Bly Manor: why Henry James’s eerie tale still inspires so many adaptations(The Conversation, 2020-10-12) Layne, BethanyItem Metadata only Henry James in Contemporary Fiction: The Real Thing(Palgrave, 2020-04) Layne, BethanyThis book explores the extraordinary proliferation of novels based on Henry James’s life and works published between 2001 and 2016, the centenary of his death. Part One concentrates on biofictions about James by David Lodge and Colm Tóibín, and those written from the perspective of the key female figures in his life. Part Two explores appropriations of The Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw, and The Ambassadors. The book articulates the developments in biographical and adaptive writing that enabled millennial writers to engage so explicitly with James, locates the sources of his appeal, and explores the different forms of engagement taken. Layne analyses how these manifestations of James’s legacy might function differently for knowing versus unknowing readers, and how they might perform the role of literary criticism. Overarching themes include ideas of queering, the concern with seeking redress, and the frustrated quest for origin, authenticity, or ‘the real thing’.Item Embargo Henry would never know he hadn't written it himself: The Implications of "Dictation" (2008) for Jamesian Style(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) Layne, BethanyThis essay explores the critical implications of Cynthia Ozick’s “Dictation,” a work of biographical fiction in which James and Conrad’s typists covertly exchange excerpts from “The Jolly Corner” and “The Secret Sharer.” Ozick’s conceit enables us to read against the plot of the tales, emphasizing the queer desire of each hero for his alter ego over the narrative restoration of compulsory heterosexuality. Her disruption of the link between extract and referent disallows naïve attempts to extrapolate a gay biographical subject from a queer reading of the text, emphasizing Jamesian style’s intrinsic reluctance to anchor the sign to a coherent identity.Item Open Access Her Own Words Describe Her Best? Reconstructing Plath’s Original Ariel in Sylvia (2003) and Wintering (2003)(2019-08-31) Layne, BethanyThis article explores two of Sylvia Plath’s afterlives: John Brownlow and Christine Jeffs’ biopic Sylvia (2003) and Kate Moses’s novel Wintering (2003). Contrary to Frieda Hughes’s assertion that such works attempt to “breathe life into” Plath (xvii), I show how these are textual resuscitations, engaging intimately with Plath’s then-unpublished Ariel manuscript. I explore how both writers’ decision to omit the second wave of Ariel poems contests Hughes’s arrangement of the collection, and severs the link, fostered in Ariel and confirmed in Birthday Letters, between Plath’s writing and her death. I then show how the texts’ readings of Ariel nuance interpretations of Plath herself, emphasising her pursuit of transcendence over her drive towards self-destruction. These biographical works ultimately yield significant critical implications, popularising long-standing scholarly debates about “why the differences between the two version of Ariel matter” (Badia 162) and catalysing the canon-reformation that produced Ariel: The Restored Edition.Item Open Access I did it, I: The Afterlife of Sylvia Plath's Journals, 1956-2003(Oxford University Press, 2014-04-02) Layne, BethanyThis essay challenges what Sarah Cardwell calls the ‘centre-based model of adaptation’ by reinstating a chain of literary texts between a passage in Emma Tennant’s The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted (2001) and the entry in Sylvia Plath’s journals that is Tennant’s ostensible source. By demonstrating that the intervening works are intertextual and adaptive and that the journals themselves adapt lived experience, the essay contributes to the troubling of “originality” as an appropriate critical standard. It concludes that the act of adaptation enhances the aura surrounding the extratextual event by appending a mythological status, renewed with each successive adaptation.Item Open Access Julia Novak and Caitríona Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction(University of Groningen Press, 2023-12-31) Layne, BethanyTaking its cue from Judith Butler’s definition of gender as ‘a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint’ (2), this volume of essays sets out to explore biographical fiction’s innovations in gender, and also in genre. Deliberately avoiding ‘grand theor[ies]’ (3), the editors offer an understanding of genre as historically situated and in constant flux; like existing tropes of gender, concepts of genre are seen as available to biofiction’s rewritings.Item Open Access Portraits and Palimpsests: Review of John Banville's Mrs Osmond(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) Layne, BethanyItem Embargo Postmodernism and the Biographical Novel(Bloomsbury, 2018-10) Layne, BethanyItem Open Access Queering The Ambassadors: Michiel Heyns's Invisible Furies and Jamesian Appropriation(2016) Layne, BethanyItem Open Access Item Metadata only