Overview
- Provides a long view of biographilia, from the Victorian era to the present day
- Provides the first cultural history of the fascinating figure of James Barry
- Draws on a wealth of rich archival research
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Table of contents (5 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Senior colonial officer from 1813 to 1859, Inspector General James Barry was a pioneering medical reformer who after his death in 1865 became the object of intense speculation when rumours arose about his sex. This cultural history of Barry’s afterlives in Victorian to contemporary (neo-Victorian) life-writing (‘biographilia’) examines the textual and performative strategies of biography, biofiction and biodrama of the last one and a half centuries. In exploring the varied reconstructions and re-imaginations of the historical personality across time, the book illustrates (not least with its cover image) that the ‘real’ James Barry does not exist, any more than does the ‘faithful’ biographical, biofictional or biodramatic rendering of a life in a generically ‘stable’ and discrete form. What Barry represents and how he is represented invariably pinpoints the imaginative, the speculative and the performative: reflections and refractions in the looking glass of genre. Just as ‘James Miranda Barry’, as a subject of cultural inquiry, comes into being and remains in view in the act of crossing gender, so neo-Victorian life-writing constitutes itself through similar acts of boundary transgression. Transgender thus finds its most typical expression in transgenre.
Reviews
“Neo-/Victorian Biographilia is a brilliant addition to both nineteenth-century studies and transgender studies. Anyone who has puzzled over the gender-bending moments in the Brontës or Wilkie Collins—pick your favorite author—will find Heilmann’s study valuable. It is one of the best guides I have read about Victorian and neo-Victorian gender performance.” (Martha Vicinus, Victorian Studies, Vol. 62(1), 2019)
“Ann Heilmann’s Neo-/Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry: A Study in Transgender and Transgenre enters this morass of interpretations with great aplomb. She steadfastly refuses to identify Barry as intersexed or transgendered or any other label. Through a series of careful readings she shows the ways in which writers have negotiated the tension between gender identity and gender representation, a slippage that seems intrinsic to every version of Barry’s life … Her detailed examination of the history of Barry’s biographilia is a model for future studies of Victorian and neo-Victorian histories of gender crossing.” (Martha Vicinus, University of Michigan for Victorian Studies, Autumn 2019)“How is it that some years after the death of the subject was pronounced, lifewriting in numerous forms – biography, biofiction, autobiography, meta-autobiography, biodrama – has returned with such force? Taking as its case study the fascinating story of James Miranda Barry, a man who achieved the highest rank as a medical officer in the British military, only to be revealed as a woman after his death, this detailed and accomplished study explores the intersections of genre-bending and gender-bending that have marked the textual afterlife of this extraordinary figure in a lively and engaging way. The result is a captivating cultural history of James Miranda Barry and his biographilial afterlives, as well as a rigorous rethinking of neo-Victorian biographilia, an inherently trans-genred form. It is essential reading for studies of lifewriting and neo-Victorianism.” (Kate Mitchell, Head of the School of English & Drama, Australian National University, Australia)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Ann Heilmann is Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University, UK. The author of three previous monographs, on New Woman Fiction, New Woman Strategies, and Neo-Victorianism (with Mark Llewellyn), she has co-edited a scholarly edition and essay collection on the Anglo-Irish author George Moore. Further (single and collaborative) work includes four essay collections and four anthology sets on late-Victorian, early twentieth-century and contemporary feminism and women’s writing.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Neo-/Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry
Book Subtitle: A Study in Transgender and Transgenre
Authors: Ann Heilmann
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71386-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-71385-4Published: 11 July 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-10048-3Published: 29 December 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-71386-1Published: 27 June 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXIV, 402
Number of Illustrations: 32 b/w illustrations
Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Gender Studies, Cultural History