ABSTRACT
The French, Germans, and Americans did much to contribute to the rise, legitimization, and now dominance of biofiction, but the Irish have done the most. Why? The biographical novelist Lance Olsen claims that genres come into existence because they do something that others cannot. As a colonized country, the Irish were mentally and politically subjugated, so artists needed to develop a type of literature that would expose supersubtle forms of psycho-cultural and socio-political enslavement and promote comprehensive forms of individual and national freedom. Biofiction performs this service by charting the way an actual person was able to decolonize the mind and to project into existence a more emancipated way of being. To illustrate how this works, I briefly examine a few exceptional Irish biofictions.
