Neo-/victorian biographilia and James Miranda Barry
- Creator
- Heilmann, Ann
Neo-/victorian biographilia and James Miranda Barry
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 life-writing (‘biographilia’) examines strategies of biography, biofiction and biodrama of the last one and a half centuries. In exploring the reconstructions and re-imaginations of the historical personality across time, the book illustrates 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.
- Creator
- Heilmann, Ann