Biography and/an experimental fiction definition

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Experimental fiction is a genre of literary work wherein writers focus on using innovative storytelling techniques that defy literary norms and conventions.

See link in pdf. This essay approaches the large but surprisingly under-theorized topic of the relation between autobiography and fiction, concentrating on the period between and , arguing for a new account of the relation between Modernism and life-writing. Where Reynolds outlines the rationale for autobiografiction in fairly defensive terms, I argue for an appreciation of its radical potentialities.

This is placed in a broader philosophical and aesthetic context of reading fiction as autobiography, and autobiography as fiction. Experiments in Life-Writing is a collection of essays about the 'recent explosion of experimentation in life-writing', as Julia Novak calls it in her introductory essay. Johnson pointed out, the word 'experimental' is often a euphemism for 'failure'.

Nonetheless, it is also a useful umbrella term for this kind of collection: it handily marks out an unruly and diverse group of texts from more conventional forms of life-writing in a loose 'family resemblance' way. There are also, to conclude the volume, essays on biography by practitioners Will Slocombe and Ursula Hurley, and an interview with the biographical novelist Janice Galloway.

In her quotation from the Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, Novak positions experimental texts as permanently embattled, raising.

Experimental literature is a genre of literature that is generally difficult to define with any sort of precision.

Other people's life stories fascinate us, and we seem to have an urgent need to record these stories. As writers continue to experiment with the formal and aesthetic possibilities of rendering their subjects' lives in ever new ways, the modes of writing about historical lives have diversified enormously, and continue to do so. The proliferation of public interest in accounts of historical lives in recent decades-captured by such buzzwords as "biography boom" or "memoir craze"-is reflected in the similarly expanding field of life-writing studies, as scholars regularly re-conceptualise their object of study to keep pace with the rapid evolution of life-writing forms and to incorporate the new insights their discipline has yielded.

Within this context, the term "life-writing" itself has emerged to reflect the diverse work conducted in the field. It has now come to stand for a range of writings about lives or parts of lives, or which provide materials out of which lives or parts of lives are composed. These writings include not only memoir, autobiography, biography, diaries, autobiographical fiction, and biographical fiction, but also letters, writs, wills, written anecdotes, depositions, court proceedings,.