Session 1 - Variations on biofiction (Chair : Georges Letissier)

COLLOQUE INTERNATIONAL ANNUEL
SOCIETE D ETUDE ANGLAISES CONTEMPORAINES

The (Neo-)Historical in British Literature and Visual Arts (20th-21st c.)

Drawing on the ethics of care, Ayako Mizuo (Ryukoku University, Kyoto, Japan)  discusses the way in which sisterhood and female autonomy are represented through the biofictional narrative of Cassandra in Miss Austen. She then explores the way in which Anne Elliot’s autonomy is demonstrated through the sisterhood deployed in Persuasion (1817) which is occasionally referred to in Hornby’s Miss Austen.She argues that a neo-historical reading of Austen in terms of sisterhood and female autonomy has significance for recent scholarship on Jane Austen. 

James Dalrymple (Université Grenoble-Alpes, France) explores the way in which Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner engages with expectations around biographical film and discusses Leigh’s idiosyncratic approach to character and project of “comique grotesquery”. 

 In this talk Dorothea Flothow (University of Salzburg, Austria) shows that Philip Kerr’s homage to Erich Kästner’s  famous children’s novel Emil und die Detektive (1929, English title: Emil and the Detectives) show-cases some of the key intergeneric trends and political engagements of the historical novel as it has developed in recent years.