Michael Lackey – författare

In the late sixties and early seventies, black separatist movements were sweeping across the United States. This was the era of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael''s and Charles Hamilton''s Black Power, and Eldridge Cleaver''s Soul on Ice. In 1969 a group of distinguished African American intellectuals met at Haverford College in order to devise strategies to dissuade young blacks from adopting a separatist political agenda. The participants included some of the most prominent figures of the civil rights era--Ralph Ellison, John Hope Franklin, and J. Saunders Redding, to name only a notable few. Although these discussions were recorded, transcribed, and edited, they were never published because the funding for them was withdrawn. This volume at last makes the historic Haverford discussions available, rescuing for the modern reader some of the most eloquent voices in the intellectual history of black America.

Michael Lackey has edited and annotated the transcript of this lively exchange, and Alfred E. Prettyman has supplied an afterword. While acknowledging the importance of the black power and separatist movements, Lackey’s introduction also sheds light on the insights offered by critics of those movements. Despite the frequent characterization of the dissenting integrationists as Uncle Toms or establishment intellectuals, a misrepresentation that has marginalized them in the intervening decades, Lackey argues that they had their own compelling vision for black empowerment and sociopolitical integration.

Biofiction: An Introduction provides readers with the history, origins, evolution, and legitimization of biofiction, suggesting potential lines of inquiry, exploring criticisms of the literary form, and modeling the process of analyzing and interpreting individual texts. Written for undergraduate and graduate students, this volume combines comprehensive coverage of the core foundations of biofiction with contemporary and lively debates within the subject. The volume aims to confront and illuminate the following questions:

• When did biofiction come into being?

• What forces gave birth to it?

• How does it uniquely function and signify?

• Why has it become such a dominant aesthetic form in recent years?

This introduction will give readers a framework for evaluating specific biofictions from writers as varied as Friedrich Nietzsche, George Moore, Zora Neale Hurston, William Styron, Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates, and Colm Tóibín, thus enabling readers to assess the value and impact of individual works on the culture at large. Spanning nineteenth-century origins to contemporary debates and adaptations, this book not only equips the reader with a firm grounding in the fundamentals of biofiction but also provides a valuable guide to the uncanny power of the biographical novel to transform cultural attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs.

Biofiction: An Introduction provides readers with the history, origins, evolution, and legitimization of biofiction, suggesting potential lines of inquiry, exploring criticisms of the literary form, and modeling the process of analyzing and interpreting individual texts. Written for undergraduate and graduate students, this volume combines comprehensive coverage of the core foundations of biofiction with contemporary and lively debates within the subject. The volume aims to confront and illuminate the following questions:

• When did biofiction come into being?

• What forces gave birth to it?

• How does it uniquely function and signify?

• Why has it become such a dominant aesthetic form in recent years?

This introduction will give readers a framework for evaluating specific biofictions from writers as varied as Friedrich Nietzsche, George Moore, Zora Neale Hurston, William Styron, Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates, and Colm Tóibín, thus enabling readers to assess the value and impact of individual works on the culture at large. Spanning nineteenth-century origins to contemporary debates and adaptations, this book not only equips the reader with a firm grounding in the fundamentals of biofiction but also provides a valuable guide to the uncanny power of the biographical novel to transform cultural attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs.

Biofiction, defined as literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure, first became popular in the 1930s, but over the last forty years it has become a dominant literary form. Prominent writers such as J.M. Coetzee, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Julia Alvarez, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel, Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, Colum McCann, and Michael Cunningham have authored spectacular biographical novels which have won some of the world’s most prestigious awards for fiction.

However, in spite of the prominence of these authors, works, and awards, there has been considerable confusion about the nature of biofiction. This collection of process pieces and academic essays from authors and scholars of biofiction defines the nature of the aesthetic form, clarifies why it has come into being, specifies what it is uniquely capable of signifying, illustrates how it pictures the historical and critiques the political, and suggests potential directions for future studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Biofiction, defined as literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure, first became popular in the 1930s, but over the last forty years it has become a dominant literary form. Prominent writers such as J.M. Coetzee, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Julia Alvarez, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel, Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, Colum McCann, and Michael Cunningham have authored spectacular biographical novels which have won some of the world’s most prestigious awards for fiction.

However, in spite of the prominence of these authors, works, and awards, there has been considerable confusion about the nature of biofiction. This collection of process pieces and academic essays from authors and scholars of biofiction defines the nature of the aesthetic form, clarifies why it has come into being, specifies what it is uniquely capable of signifying, illustrates how it pictures the historical and critiques the political, and suggests potential directions for future studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.