Julia Novak and Caitríona Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction

Taking 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.