Â鶹Éçmadou

In her interrogation of the rules of the genre of biography, Hermoine Lee observed, ‘Some biographies read more like fiction than history’ . Poetics are political, as reviewers and readers make claims to how a biography should read — stylistically — to reflect assumptions of truth and authority in the genre.

This seminar will discuss how the poetics of my recent speculative biography, Miles Franklin Undercover, align with William Poole's oxymoronic notion of rigorous speculation,  and how intertextual and paratextual narrative strategies can support speculative biography’s poetics; rigour, while reading as fiction.