Michael Lackey
Michael Lackey is Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches courses about 20th- and 21st-century intellectual, political, and literary history. Over the years, Lackey has received prestigious fellowships and honors: he received Germany's Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in 2001; in 2009 he was a residential fellow at the University of Minnesota's Institute for Advanced Study; he was named Distinguished McKnight University Professor by the University of Minnesota in 2016; in the spring of 2020, he was the Martha Daniel Newell research professor at Georgia College; he was the Obama Fellow at the Obama Institute in Germany at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in May 2024; and he was a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Hungary (specifically, the Laszlo Orszagh Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Pécs) in the spring of 2025. In 2021, he was inducted into the University of Minnesota's Academy of Distinguished Teachers. He is also one of the editors-in-chief of Bloomsbury Academic's Biofiction Studies series. He actively seeks and publishes high-quality work about biofiction.
As a graduate student, his research focused on the role atheism played in re-configuring western theories of love. At that time, he centered his work on Friedrich Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf. After finishing his PhD, he shifted his scholarly attention to atheistic critiques of religious belief. In particular, he concentrated on African American atheists, who illustrated how the God-concept was frequently used as a weapon against Blacks. While doing that book, he noticed that many prominent Black writers made a startling claim: they said that Hitler and the Nazis were Christian, and that, had they not been Christian, the Holocaust would never have occurred. It was this idea that led to his second book, which defines the specific version of Christianity that Hitler and the Nazis adopted. Since that book, he has been doing research about the rise and legitimization of the biographical novel. Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure. Lackey has been trying to define the kind of "truth" that biofiction gives readers. He offers some answers to this question in his many books about biofiction, including The American Biographical Novel; Ireland, the Irish, and the Rise of Biofiction; and Biofiction: An Introduction.
Address: Morris, Minnesota, United States
As a graduate student, his research focused on the role atheism played in re-configuring western theories of love. At that time, he centered his work on Friedrich Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf. After finishing his PhD, he shifted his scholarly attention to atheistic critiques of religious belief. In particular, he concentrated on African American atheists, who illustrated how the God-concept was frequently used as a weapon against Blacks. While doing that book, he noticed that many prominent Black writers made a startling claim: they said that Hitler and the Nazis were Christian, and that, had they not been Christian, the Holocaust would never have occurred. It was this idea that led to his second book, which defines the specific version of Christianity that Hitler and the Nazis adopted. Since that book, he has been doing research about the rise and legitimization of the biographical novel. Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure. Lackey has been trying to define the kind of "truth" that biofiction gives readers. He offers some answers to this question in his many books about biofiction, including The American Biographical Novel; Ireland, the Irish, and the Rise of Biofiction; and Biofiction: An Introduction.
Address: Morris, Minnesota, United States
less
InterestsView All (39)
Uploads
Books by Michael Lackey
The volume is organized into seven sections: Histories of biofiction; Theoretical reflections on biofiction; Biofiction, national models and (trans)national constructions; Biofiction as political intervention; Biofictional case studies; Activating lives: early modern women; and Authorial reflections. This groundbreaking collection features works that refine our understanding of the genesis and evolution of biofiction; theorize its unique and distinctive modes of signifying; reflect on its value for the future and social justice; chart new approaches for doing biofictional analysis; and offer insights from authors of biofiction into the creative process.
This is the first collection to bring together the two main schools of interpreting biofiction – the Francophone and Anglophone – while also shedding light on biofictions in many languages, from or about many continents, and offering a platform to established and new voices alike. It will be essential reading for students as well as advanced scholars interested in biographical fiction.
Michael Lackey first examines the groundbreaking biofictions that Oscar Wilde and George Moore authored in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as the best biographical novels about Wilde (by Peter Ackroyd and Colm Tóibín). He then focuses on contemporary authors of biofiction (Sabina Murray, Graham Shelby, Anne Enright, and Mario Vargas Llosa, who Lackey has interviewed for this work) who use the lives of prominent Irish figures (Roger Casement and Eliza Lynch) to explore the challenges of seizing and securing a life-promoting form of agency within a colonial and patriarchal context.
In conclusion, Lackey briefly analyzes biographical novels by Peter Carey and Mary Morrissy to illustrate why agency is of central importance for the Irish, and why that focus mandated the rise of the biographical novel, a literary form that mirrors the constructed Irish interior.
Papers by Michael Lackey
figures; it has become a dominant literary form over the last thirty-five
years, resulting in spectacular works from global luminaries as varied as
Gabriel García Márquez, J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol
Oates, Mario Vargas Llosa, Peter Carey, Olga Tokarczuk, and Hilary Mantel, just to mention a notable few. Studies about biofiction have surged over the last ten years, but what scholars have not yet noted is the African American contribution to the evolution, rise, and legitimization of biofiction. This special issue of African American Review is devoted to African American biofiction, but it is important to clarify what is meant here. Biofictions that are written by African Americans but also about African Americans would qualify as African American biofiction, so, even though Colum McCann is a prominent Irish American writer, his novel TransAtlantic would qualify as an African American biofiction because Frederick Douglass is one of the protagonists.
author’s own take on their works and emphasize the continued relevance of lessons learned from great modernists. Moving on to our literary examples, we use testimonies by authors as well as textual examples from Maggie Gee and Colm Tóibín to highlight biofiction’s polemic take on the Death of the Author and develop a theory of “double anchoring”, meaning that writer-inspired biofictions have a two-tiered approach to the literary tradition, integrating both factual details about the authors they portray and intertextual elements from these authors’ works. Our main case studies, analyzed in the subsequent sections, can be divided into biofictions that work inside the postmodern paradigm, revealing its limits and challenging it from within, such as Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), and biofictions that break away from the perpetual instability of truth models, proposing new ways of constructing authors by not just acknowledging the inaccessibility of the past in an ever-repeated deconstructive gesture, but by also proposing alternative views of the past which can offer more than factual narratives do, as we show with the examples of Tóibín’s The Master (2004) and Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). We conclude that, while many authors of biofiction are aware of contemporary theory’s erasure of the author, they not only reject the idea that it is a total erasure but have also resurrected a version of the writer that is an amalgamation of fact and fiction.