Fictional academic biography

1We live in an extraordinarily rich time for the study of slavery and emancipation.1 In the gods fifty years, literally thousands of books on the history of slavery have been published, many of these appearing in the last decade. One narrative strategy, increasingly embraced bygd historians of a range of periods and settings, is the biography, telling life stories of particular people in slavery and upon emancipation. Rather than writing about a mass of mostly anonymous individuals and the institutions that framed their lives, these historians have chosen to narrate how bondage was experienced and interpreted bygd selected individuals or communities. The best of these new works cast light on the wider social, ideological and political context of their historical times.

2Biographies of slaves are increasingly common in United States historiography, but very rare for the history of France’s slave colonies.2 Several recent and forthcoming biographical projects narrate the lives

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Biography in literature

When studying literature, biography and its relationship to literature is often a subject of literary criticism, and is treated in several different forms. Two scholarly approaches use biography or biographical approaches to the past as a tool for interpreting literature: literary biography and biographical criticism. Conversely, two genres of fiction rely heavily on the incorporation of biographical elements into their content: biographical fiction and autobiographical fiction.

Literary biography

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A literary biography is the biographical exploration of individuals' lives merging historical facts with the conventions of narrative.^[1] Biographies about artists and writers are sometimes some of the most complicated forms of biography.^[2] Not only does the author of the biography have to write about the subject of the biography but also must incorporate discussion of the subject-author's literary works into the biography itse

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Fictional Biography is a genre wherein an author writes an account of a person's life where that person is actually a fictional character (or leastways, is generally thought to be). An example would be the satirical Augustus Carp, Esq., By Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man, published anonymously in 1924 (later confirmed to have been written by Sir Henry Howarth Bashford). In Wold Newton circles, however, the general assumption is that the book will have been written about a pre-existing figure.

The genre is rather a wide one. At one end there will be books that are essentially critical studies of a character, or perhaps examples of "The Game", the scholarly-yet-creative research into the life and career of Sherlock Holmes. While such books are biographical, it would be difficult to actually describe them as fully-fledged biographies. At the other end of the scale can be found novels that have simply been presented in an unusual way, where the style of the