Italian biofiction

This chapter tells the history of biofiction in Italy, starting from the first, and isolated, experiments of the forties (Narrate, uomini, la vostra storia, by Alberto Savinio, 1942, and Artemisia by Anna Banti, 1947) up to the works published in the first twenty years of the 21st century by authors like Michele Mari (Rosso Floyd, 2010), Davide Orecchio (Città distrutte, 2012), Walter Siti (La natura è innocente. Due vite quasi vere, 2020), Antonio Scurati (M., 2019), Marta Barone (Città sommersa, 2021) and others. Some of the problems on which I focus my attention are: 1) the way in which biographical fiction has gradually emancipated itself from the nineteenth-century historical novel; 2) its differences with the fictionalized biography ; 3) the reference to important late nineteenth-century models such as Marcel Schwob's Vies imaginaires (1896), which, together with the works of Jorge Luis Borges, influenced authors of collection of (short) biofictions such as Rodolfo Wilcock (La sinagoga degli iconoclasti, 1972), Antonio Tabucchi (Sogni di Sogni, 1993) and Davide Orecchio (Città distrutte, 2012); 4) different types of fictionality in Italian biofiction, mainly considered by a narratological point of view; 5) recurrence of structural patterns like that of “parallel lives” and the persistence of the Plutarchic model in modern biofiction. The chapter also shows the internal evolution of the genre and its progressive fortune (of critics and audiences) starting from the Eighties, when also in Italy a postmodern poetics is affirmed, and up to the last two decades, when biofiction has finally become a genre of success thanks to popular authors such as Siti and Scurati.