Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives

Marleen Rensen is Senior Lecturer in Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, and co-edited and introduced the special collection Life Writing and European Identities (2019) and the volume Unhinging the National Framework: Perspectives on Transnational Life Writing (2020).Christopher Wiley is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Surrey, UK. He is the author of many journal articles and book chapters, and the co-editor of volumes including Researching and Writing on Contemporary Art and Artists (2020), Writing About Contemporary Musicians (2020) and The Routledge Companion to Autoethnography and Self-Reflexivity in Music Studies (2021).

“The collection contributors come from a variety of disciplines—lifewriting studies, history, literature, music, and visual art—to consider biographical subjects from around the globe. ... The book encourages the exploration of the space between author and subject, and between subject and audience—topics that lifewriting scholars have explored, especially in the area of autobiography ... .” (Julie Codell, Biography, Vol. 46 (2), 2023)

• 1. ‘Writing Artists’ Lives Across Nations and Cultures: Biography, Biofiction and Transnationality; Marleen Rensen and Christopher Wiley.- 2. The Transnational Aspect in Harold Nicolson’s The Development of English Biography; Maryam Thirriard.- 3. Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky: A Reassessment of Transnational Identities and Abstraction through Biography; Suzanne Bode.- 4. Frances Hodgkins: A Twentieth-Century Modernist Painter Torn Between Nations; Samantha Niederman.- 5. “No use calling yourself South African. South African is nothing”: Understanding and exploring the concept of place and nationhood in the life and music of Christopher James; Marc Röntsch.- 6. The Spanish Translations of Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories; Jane McVeigh.- 7. Alienation and Intimacy: Transnational Writing on Julia Margaret Cameron; Tamar Hager.- 8. A Hungarian Woman Writer’s Transnational Afterlife in the Digital Era: Renée Erdős (1879–1956); Anna Menyhért.- 9. "Something out of the way": Edmund Gosse’s biography of Henrik Ibsen; Suze van der Poll.- 10. Chopin on the Dneiper: The Musician-Poet and Boris Pasternak’s Search for the Transnational; Maria Razumovskaya.- 11. “All the nuances of his predicament”: Caryl Phillips on James Baldwin; Josiane Ranguin.- 12. Vie de Paula Modersohn Becker by Marie Darrieussecq: BetweenPortrait and Self-Portrait; Manet van Montfrans.- 13. “Don’t tell anyone”: K. Schippers’s novelist reflections on life-writing and transnationality; Sander Bax.- 14. The Hours and the Nations: Virginia Woolf’s Life and Art in Michael Cunningham’s America; Maximiliano Jiménez.- 15. Ethel Smyth as the composer Edith Staines in E.F. Benson’s Dodo trilogy; Christopher Wiley.