Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives: From the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Palgrave Studies in Life Writing) - Hardcover

‘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.