Thresholds of Innovation: Conceptualising Imaginative Writing and Fiction Biography

Abstract

In her recent, wide-ranging survey of innovation in the biographical field, Donna Brien points out that while biography is widely understood as "a literature that tells straightforward, factual stories of lives as written by someone else", it continues, paradoxically, "to be the site of considerable experimentation" (2014: 2). But having catalogued some of the most interesting and influential of these at length, she notes that, despite the acknowledgement of creative construction, debates continue over the validity of experiment and innovation in biography and that [i]nevitably, perhaps, these debates repeat main threads of argument. The first positions biographical fact as being allied to 'truth', while any invention/innovation is, therefore, inevitably related to fiction and, therefore, falsity. The second is to ally conventional forms and practices with ideas of 'solid' history, fact and truth (and 'good' biography), meaning that any experimentation or innovation is understood as leading to falsity, manipulation, underhandedness and a degradation of the form (Brien 2014: 4). While engaging the threads of argument that Brien refers to is not my purpose here, they appear to displace an increasingly large body of work that is recognisably biographical and often embodies a similar breadth of research, but that is imaginatively written or entirely (or in part) presented as fiction.