英美传记小说的文类困境与突围——以戴维·洛奇传记小说为例

The Generic Dilemma and Breakthrough of Anglo-American Biographical Novels:Taking David Lodge’s Biographical Novels as an Example

传记小说是英美小说创作的新趋势。传记小说集传记、小说、文学批评于一身,具有纪实、虚构、学术研究等多重特征,其文类归属等问题面临诸多困惑。戴维·洛奇在传记小说中反思传记小说文类本质,寻找突破传记小说文类困境的路径:一方面,洛奇与读者订立文类契约,并在小说的副标题、题记、后记(致谢)等处多次提及、印证,引导读者阅读;另一方面,洛奇在引用文献史料的同时,运用多视角聚焦等小说策略,在纪实与虚构之间达到微妙平衡。传记小说是传记与小说'联姻'的产物,是一个跨文类的'混血儿',是'生命书写'的新类型。

Biographical novel,straddling biography,novel and literary criticism and claiming multiple traits of fiction,non-fiction as well as literary research,encounters a generic controversy.David Lodge reflects upon the essential attributes of biographical novels and tries to find a breakthrough of this dilemma.On the one hand,he makes a genre pact with readers as a guidance and refers to it in the paratexts of the subtitle,preface and acknowledgement;on the other hand,Lodge strikes a delicate balance between the traditional life writing and the literary imagination through a few techniques of fiction.This paper concludes that the biographical novel which is a hybridized offspring of biography and fiction has emerged as a new sub-genre of life writing.