This book demonstrates the significance of transnationality for studying and writing the lives of artists. While painters, musicians and writers have long been cast as symbols of their associated nations, recent research is increasingly drawing attention to those aspects of their lives and works that resist or challenge the national framework. The volume showcases different ways of treating transnationality in life writing by and about artists, investigating how the transnational can offer intriguing new insights on artists who straddle different nations and cultures. It further explores ways of adopting transnational perspectives in artists’ biographies in order to deal with experiences of cultural otherness or international influences, and analyses cross-cultural representations of artists in biography and biofiction. Gathering together insights from biographers and scholars with expertise in literature, music and the visual arts, Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives opens up rich avenues for researching transnationality in the cultural domain at large.
Arvustused
The collection contributors come from a variety of disciplineslifewriting studies, history, literature, music, and visual artto consider biographical subjects from around the globe. ... The book encourages the exploration of the space between author and subject, and between subject and audiencetopics that lifewriting scholars have explored, especially in the area of autobiography ... . (Julie Codell, Biography, Vol. 46 (2), 2023)
1. Writing Artists Lives Across Nations and Cultures: Biography,
Biofiction and Transnationality; Marleen Rensen and Christopher Wiley.-
2. The Transnational Aspect in Harold Nicolsons The Development of English
Biography; Maryam Thirriard.- 3. Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky: A
Reassessment of Transnational Identities and Abstraction through
Biography; Suzanne Bode.- 4. Frances Hodgkins: A Twentieth-Century Modernist
Painter Torn Between Nations; Samantha Niederman.- 5. No use calling
yourself South African. South African is nothing: Understanding and
exploring the concept of place and nationhood in the life and music of
Christopher James; Marc Röntsch.- 6. The Spanish Translations of Richmal
Cromptons Just William stories; Jane McVeigh.- 7. Alienation and
Intimacy: Transnational Writing on Julia Margaret Cameron; Tamar Hager.- 8. A
Hungarian Woman Writers Transnational Afterlife in the Digital Era: Renée
Erds (18791956); Anna Menyhért.- 9. "Something out of the way":
Edmund Gosses biography of Henrik Ibsen; Suze van der Poll.- 10. Chopin on
the Dneiper: The Musician-Poet and Boris Pasternaks Search for the
Transnational; Maria Razumovskaya.- 11. All the nuances of his predicament:
Caryl Phillips on James Baldwin; Josiane Ranguin.-
12. Vie de Paula Modersohn Becker by Marie Darrieussecq: BetweenPortrait and
Self-Portrait; Manet van Montfrans.- 13. Dont tell anyone: K. Schipperss
novelist reflections on life-writing and transnationality; Sander Bax.-
14. The Hours and the Nations: Virginia Woolfs Life and Art in Michael
Cunninghams America; Maximiliano Jiménez.- 15. Ethel Smyth as the composer
Edith Staines in E.F. Bensons Dodo trilogy; Christopher Wiley.
Marleen Rensen is Senior Lecturer in Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, and co-edited and introduced the special collection Life Writing and European Identities (2019) and the volume Unhinging the National Framework: Perspectives on Transnational Life Writing (2020).
Christopher Wiley is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Surrey, UK. He is the author of many journal articles and book chapters, and the co-editor of volumes including Researching and Writing on Contemporary Art and Artists (2020), Writing About Contemporary Musicians (2020) and The Routledge Companion to Autoethnography and Self-Reflexivity in Music Studies (2021).
