MACMILLAN Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives (Palgrave Studies in Life Writing)

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. Review ‘This impressively varied and highly accessible book is characterized by an open and inclusive attitude towards the subjects it covers. Its innovative transnationalist perspective facilitates interaction between fields that really ought to communicate more. Refreshingly, it takes “fictional” life writing seriously as contributing to the shaping of the afterlives of artists. There may not be one way of “doing” biography, but, surely, this is the best way of doing biography research.’ ― Dr Dennis Kersten, Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, Radboud University, The Netherlands From the Back Cover ‘This impressively varied and highly accessible book is characterized by an open and inclusive attitude towards the subjects it covers. Its innovative transnationalist perspective facilitates interaction between fields that really ought to communicate more. Refreshingly, it takes “fictional” life writing seriously as contributing to the shaping of the afterlives of artists. There may not be one way of “doing” biography, but, surely, this is the best way of doing biography research.’ ― Dr Dennis Kersten, Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, Radboud University, The Netherlands 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, as well as analysing 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. About the Author 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