The Art of Resurrection

Affectivity and Afterlives in Historical Biofiction

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which writers of biofiction manipulate the tools of narrative to generate fictional representations of real historical figures and broker an affective relationship between the reader and the protagonist of the text. Narratological perspectives offered by Dorrit Cohn and the methodology of cognitive poetics advanced by Peter Stockwell inform analysis of recent exemplars of the genre, including Kate Grenville’s A Room Made of Leaves (2020), Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague (2020), and Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light (2019). Particular attention is paid to the authors’ use of tense, structure, and narrative point of view as practical techniques for ‘resurrecting’ the dead. I argue that the felt response to the protagonist is part of the immersive experience of fiction generally but biofiction in particular, making the genre a powerful medium for shaping the afterlives of historical figures.