Byatt, 'Fiction and Biofiction'

A. S. Byatt’s fiction is much possessed by ‘lives’ – not only the lives of her characters, but the ideas of the biographies of those characters, and of characters as biographers. The lecture will explore the relation between fiction, biography, and autobiography in her work, taking in such topics as portraiture, myth, creation, and reading. It will ask why a novelist who has written about earlier historical periods has eschewed one of the defining devices of the historical novel – and postmodern biofiction – of using real historical figures as characters.