ABSTRACT
The road to an understanding and legitimizing of biofiction has been difficult and oftentimes confusing. It would seem that biofiction-literature that names its protagonist after an actual biographical figure-should have been dubbed a credible aesthetic form in 1937, when Georg Lukacs acknowledged “the popularity of the biographical form in the present-day historical novel” (300) in his pioneering study The Historical Novel. Works from the decade that immediately come to mind include Leonard Ehrlich’s God’s Angry Man (1932), Lion Feuchtwanger’s Josephus Flavius novels (the first of which was published in 1932), Thomas Mann’s Joseph novels (the first of which was published in 1933), Bruno Frank’s A Man Called Cervantes (1934), Robert Graves’s Claudius novels (the first of which was published in 1934), Irving Stone’s Lust for Life (1934), Heinrich Mann’s King Henry IV novels (the first of which was published in 1935), Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder (1936), Graves’s Count Belisarius (1938), Stone’s Jack London, Sailor on Horseback (1938), Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), and Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar (1939). Yet, despite the publication of so many biographical novels from well-regarded writers, Lukacs spends considerable time condemning the biographical novel as an irredeemable aesthetic form that necessarily distorts and misrepresents the objective proportions of history.1 In my contribution to this cluster, I clarify how shifts in our theories of consciousness and history have led to the rise of the contemporary biographical novel and the fall of what Lukacs refers to as the classical historical novel.
