Literary biographical films , or literary biopics , have become increasingly popular since the early 1990s, however when I first started researching about them as their own unique cultural preoccupation in 2008, there was scant information beyond viewing them as a cursory āsubgenreā within the more established and general biopic and heritage screen genres. Since then, some studies have arisen picking up on this unique phenomenon, as part of multi-authored collections exploring authors and writers on screen, and as part of wider thematic explorations of a certain āstrandā of the biopic genre. The two most notable of these for my own work have been the collection, The Writer on Film, edited by Judith Buchanan (2013), and Bronwyn Polaschekās The Postfeminist Biopic (2013). While these two works share similar issues and focus with my own, this book also seeks to trace the contemporary literary biopic within a different logic. What this book aims to offer is a more detailed approach to the literary biopic within the methodological framing of not just how these films sit within certain generic cinematic and screen tropes, but also how the recent few decades of development of the writer on screen can be viewed through a wider ideological and cultural lens. This is an approach that can only be offered through an exploration of the literary biopic as its own unique cultural preoccupation rather than as a niche by-product existing within other frames of analyses.
It is important to point out however, that the focus of this work is very much on the contemporary literary biopic rather than earlier adaptations of the author on screen, such as the early āgolden daysā of Hollywood cinema productions and biopics . I contend that such films meld more logically with the studio-system era and a different socio-economic and historical context that marks them as different, in cultural terms (if generically and thematically related) to the contemporary literary biopic. This does not mean exploration of earlier literary biopics does not, and should not, form a worthy study in and of itself. However, my own research began by considering how the past few decades have seen the emergence of a particular mode of literary biopic that expands, works with, and against certain cultural and cinematic developments, securing a quiet āboomā for literary biopics that is unique to our contemporary era. While literary biopics have always featured in cinematic history, it is only in recent times that they have boomed into a considerable cinematic trend that is worthy of investigation and exploration in and of itself through detailed, focused analyses of certain representative films within this trend. This is especially so because the contemporary literary biopic has its own particular tropes and screen ālanguageā.
However, critical analysis of literary biopics as a distinct branch of film , screen adaptation, and cultural phenomenon is currently still in its āinfancyā. Literary biopics have tended to be examined as simply another example of cinematic biopics and costume or period dramas (often called āheritageā films), bypassing their important focus on the persona of the author and their own consistent and persistent screen ālanguageā and cultural tropes. This book aims to begin āfleshing outā the analysis of this language and the cultural work these films do; from that perspective, I view it as not the end pointānot the comprehensive final wordābut only the starting point for what I hope will be continuing work on this subject area by other scholars, who may perhaps extend this work into other films, other media, and indeed, into other eras of consideration. Furthermore, while some of the specific screen adaptations and biopics I examine in this book have received some critical attention, many have notāparticularly the films about Beat authors featured in Chapter 5, which have curiously been sidelined in many explorations of screen adaptation, heritage , and period dramas, suggesting that there is still much work to be done on what we consider to be part of this authorial, adaptational, and historical tradition beyond the more marketable authors such as Jane Austen and William Shakespeare . This book also seeks to fill this gap, and insert numerous authors and their biographical iterations on screen into a collective cultural dialogue that widens the parameters of what we consider to be adaptation, heritage , period films , and biopics .
In order however to tackle this, and explore the literary biopic with the detail and nuance it deserves, this chapter seeks to flesh out a few key areas that feed into the theorising of these films and biographical screen adaptations: the context of the biography, the biopic , and heritage cinema per se; the definition of the literary biopic as its own āgenreā in this book; earlier literary biopics and their relationship with the contemporary trend; and the ideological discourse of authorship, individual identity , and subjectivity upon which so many literary biopics rely. The task before me in this chapter is therefore to provide an introductory methodological āframingā to the literary biopic through an engagement with previous debates regarding general biopics , biography, heritage cinema , and the wider figure of the author within Western culture.
The Biography, Biopics, and the Heritage Cinema Discourse
In his essay on the biographical film , Robert Rosenstone notes that there is a generally dismissive attitude towards the biopic (2007, p. 11). One of the main reasons which he discusses as the cause for such an attitude is the notion that biopics are based on a conservative idea of history as a simplified model of āgreatā individuals, providing āa coherent version of lifeā, identity, and history (2007, p. 14). As Dennis Bingham points out, this often manifests itself across gendered lines, with tales of āgreat menā highlighted as what āgreatā individuality looks like in Western culture, while women receive different kinds of biographical treatments (2010, p. 10). This further supports criticism that the biopic is a conservative genre, tied to a patriarchal past and present. These are issues that pervade criticism on the literary genre of written biography, supporting Rosenstoneās argument that āwritten biography and the biographical film are less different than they may appear to beā (2007, p. 14). In a key collection of essays on literary biography, John Batchelor introduces the primary debates that shape the analysis of written biography through reference to the genreās assumed āconservativeā status that is seen to be āimmuneā to ādeconstructionā (1995, p. 2). Indeed, one critic from the collection, JĆ¼rgen Schlaeger, writes that
Compared with the images of our culture which post-modernism projects, biography is, in spite of its intertextual construction, fundamentally reactionary, conservative, perpetually accommodating new models of man, new theories of the inner self, into a personality-oriented cultural mainstream, thus always helping to defuse their subversive potential. (1995, p. 63)
In light of the genreās privileging of Western discourses of individuality, identity, and the inner self, it is easy to see why it has been aligned with a conservative politics of ādiffusionā of postmodernism, which conversely insists on the inherent instability, and āfictionalityā of the concepts of the inner self and individual identity ; and, I would add, we can include here the ādiffusionā of contemporary intersectional politics, which manifests itself in layered, complex, and alternative models of personalised and collective identities set in antithesis to the valorised white, Western, and male subject of Humanist philosophy.
However, as much as these arguments are valid in their highlighting of the privileging of the individual within the mode of biography, they also over-generalise and fail to recognise the complex manner in which more recent biographical outputs in fact form part of this postmodern and intersectional logic. At the heart of such arguments is also the problematic assumption that all biographies essentially do the same thing, and also, that they refer back to their generic origins rather than moving forward with their own times. As Rosenstone quite rightfully points out, it is important to consider the biographical mode as a varied genre that can be presented to an audience in both subversive and conservative ways, often simultaneously so (2007, p. 15). I would also add that it is important to consider that biopics merge with, feed into and off, and help shape their own times, meaning that we cannot lump films and literary biographies made in say, the 1930s, with contemporary ones, as simply ahistorical examples of a genre, created in a cultural or contextual vacuum.
It is important however to trace such assumptions in greater detail in order to understand them, and also, because they form the heart of a certain strand of criticism that several critics such as MĆ”rta Minier and Maddalena Pennacchia (2014), George Custen (1992) , Dennis Bingham (2010), and Rosenstone (2007), to name but a few, have identified: this is the notion that the public imagination, the film industry itself, and scholarly critics have assumed a wider conservative and monolithic underpinning to literary biographies and biopics per se, as representative of not just a valorised Western philosophy of the individual, but also, of a corporatised, capitalistic notion of identity and celebrity . We owe this strand of criticism and this defining of biographyās wider cultural meaning to the de...