News-Events

‍ SUMMER 2024

A New Special issue of the journal Neo-Victorian Studies

edited by Armelle Parey and Charlotte Wadoux (University of Caen, France)

Beyond Biofiction: Writers and Writing in Neo-Victorian Media

Victorian authors feature prominently as characters in contemporary biofictions that re-imagine the lives of actual historical figures of the Long Nineteenth Century. As the genre of biofiction has garnered more attention in the last decade, notably with the creation of a book series dedicated to it – Biofiction Studies– this special issue focuses on the representation of Victorian writers, challenging Roland Barthes’s assertion regarding the death of the author and propounding the author’s return as a character in fiction and other media.

Binding together biography and fiction, biographical fiction or biofiction as a scholarly subject per se is still comparatively new, only gathering momentum in the early 2010s. This lack of recognition was mainly due to the generic cross-over entailed by the form itself which was at first considered a subgenre of the historical novel and is still at times subordinated to another genre altogether, namely that of biographies . The recognition of biofiction as a genre in its own right, evolving from “bastard” to “hybrid”, pinpoints the paradoxes inherent to the form. This state of affairs might indeed result from the irreducible hybridity of the genre, which lends itself to various interpretations, as Cora Kaplan has it: “It implies that there is something stubbornly insoluble in what separates the two genres [biography and fiction] and that prevents them from being invisibly sutured; the join will always show.” Biofiction, maybe more than any other form of fiction, is thus ready to acknowledge this “join”, embracing the idea that fiction is nourished by the extra-textual or the ‘real’. The “join” between bio and fiction is arguably most apparent in biofictions of writers, which very often focus on the writer-at-work.

Patricia has contributed an article:

Fan Fictions: Victorian Celebrity Writers and their Contemporary Defenders - Reimagining Henry James and Lewis Carroll

Read Patricia’s article (Neo-Victorian Studies website)

View the Neo-Victorian Studies website

‍ JUNE 2023

Narrative ethics and character in the representation of the past in Contemporary fiction

Friday 16th and Saturday 17th June 2023, University of Portsmouth UK

Guest speaker: Novelist Patricia Duncker

Following on from the success of Event 1 in Caen in October 2022, this conference further explores how the past is a key component of contemporary literature. Current years have seen an increased return of history and of the historical novel in mainstream fiction, from the historiographic metafictions of the 1990s to the “fresh commitment to what we might call the reality of history” (Boxall 2013) in 21st-century novels. Considering that character remains central to the novel, this two-day conference jointly organised by the Universities of Portsmouth and Caen wishes to address the issue of the past in contemporary fiction through the question of the choice of protagonists and their representation. Indeed, if we believe with Paul Ricoeur that narrative is the foundation of textual memory, if “narrative imagination is an essential preparation for moral interaction” since it develops compassion and understanding in the reader (Nussbaum 1998), then the question that begs to be asked is: can one write anything about the past in the name of the freedom of fiction and art or is there an ethical limit to representations of the past in contemporary fiction?

Call For Papers

Abstracts (with a short biographical note) are to be sent to Dr Armelle Parey (ERIBIA,

Université de Caen, France) at armelle.parey@unicaen.fr and Dr Christine Berberich, University of Portsmouth, UK) at christine.berberich@port.ac.uk by March 10th 2023. Notifications of acceptance or rejection will be sent within the following fortnight.

‍ JUNE 2023

Chase of the Wild Goose

Saturday 3rd June 2023, 2-3:30pm, Plas Newydd, Llangollen, Wales

Publisher of Lurid Editions D-M Withers in conversation with novelist Patricia Duncker

Book launch celebrating the republication of Mary Gordon's Chase of the Wild Goose.

First published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1936, Gordon's heartfelt homage to the Ladies is the forgotten queer novel of the interwar era.

Sarah Waters has described Chase of the Wild Goose as a "fascinating piece of queer literary history" and a "deeply feminist work, a celebration of courage and nonconformity."

Chase of the Wild Goose joyfully reimagines the life and times of Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, and dreams them back into existence.

Join publisher D-M Withers and acclaimed novelist Patricia Duncker for an unforgettable conversation at Plas Newydd, where the spirit of the Ladies can still be felt intimately, rushing through the grounds.

Patricia Duncker is the author of many critically acclaimed novels including Hallucinating Foucault, James Miranda Barry and Sophie and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance.

D-M Withers - Founder of Lurid Editions and Lecturer in Publishing at the University of Exeter

View poster for the event (pdf)

View press release (pdf)

Reserve a free ticket for the event

Read a short review of the event

JANUARY 2023

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction

“A Way Out of the Prison of Gender” Patricia is interviewed in this new Palgrave study edited by Julia Novak and Caitríona Ní Dhúill.

Marlon James

“Louise Simpson the poet won the Pulitzer. Michelle Cliff, Olive Senior, Mervyn Morris, Patricia Powell, Patricia Duncker; all of these writers have written fantastic and brilliant novels. Patricia Duncker’s Hallucinating Foucault is taught in nearly every gender studies class. We’ve always had writers who’ve had a big influence on American writers, even if they’re not well-known. They are all brilliant and they all have books that deserve more readers.”

Read the Marlon James interview in The Chimes newspaper

‍ SEPTEMBER 2022

Victorian Resurrections

22-24 September 2022. University of Vienna

Death and resurrection as well as the fears, fantasies and fads that surround them, pervade Victorian literature and culture in a myriad of ways. From literary representations of the dead coming back to life, to cultural practices of mourning and memorialising the dead, the Victorian era betrays a striking concern with how to cope with one's mortality.

Patricia will be a keynote speaker at the Victorian literature international conference in September with a paper entitled Resurrecting the Ghost: Victorian Fictions of Revolution, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. For more information see the University of Vienna website.

View conference website

‍ SEPTEMBER 2021

Writing and Translation

4 September 2021

Patricia took part in a Zoom conference on Writing and Translation, organised by her Russian translators, Alexandra Borisenko and Victor Sonkin at the HSE University, one of Russia's top universities. HSE hosts the first Russian MA-level course in Creative Writing and Translation. Patricia gave a presentation on Narrative Structures, her approach to writing fiction and discussed being an engaged, committed reader.

Patricia's 2nd novel, James Miranda Barry, won the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award for Foreign Fiction in 2020 and her translators were also justly honoured and recognised by the prize committee. Patricia says: "Translation is an art and a gift. I want to thank my extraordinary Russian translators who have made my fiction accessible to Russian readers."