ABSTRACT
Like biographies, biopics constitute "an amalgam of literature, history, psychology, and sociology" and feed the never-ending debate over facticity — a debate that brings to the fore the role and limitations of literary and filmic narratives in addressing historical facts. The literary biopic is a subcategory of biographical films in which lives of writers are told. Fictionalization seems to be a prerequisite of the genre, one that tends to be a highly marked feature in the literary subgenre, since a "writer might seem unpromising subject matter for a film. Despite all the efforts of literary theory and criticism of the past hundred years to detach writers' works from their biographies, most literary biopics blatantly reinforce romantic genius. Blurring boundaries seems to be one of the characteristic traits of postmodern art, and literary biopics score high in this requisite not only for mixing up historiography, literary criticism and fiction, but also for reconciling high and mass culture.
