Diploma Seminar 340-AH1-3SEM1

The seminar focuses on the British historical novel of the 20th and 21st centuries. Participants learn to recognize the features of the historical novel, its many subgenres. Reading and analyzing selected novels by contemporary British authors prepares students to undertake their own research. The seminar papers will address the following issues: ideas and values, interpretation of the past through the prism of the present, literary representation of emotions.

This seminar focuses on biographical fiction as a burgeoning genre, gaining interest among literary critics. In biofiction, the protagonist is a historical figure whose life is fictionalized by the author. Authors of biofiction do not attempt to represent the life of the subject accurately but to “convert their protagonist into a literary symbol” and “create their own vision of the world” (M. Lackey, Biographical Fiction. A Reader, p. 10). Biofiction is neither biography nor historical fiction and students attending this seminar are provided with the opportunity to explore distinctive features of all three genres and interrelations between them.

Students are invited to write their theses about representations of writers, artists, scientists, politicians, etc. and explore philosophical questions, intellectual points, and social issues conveyed and exposed in contemporary biographical fiction.

This seminar focuses on biographical fiction as a burgeoning genre, gaining interest among literary critics. In biofiction, the protagonist is a historical figure whose life is fictionalized by the author. Authors of biofiction do not attempt to represent the life of the subject accurately but to “convert their protagonist into a literary symbol” and “create their own vision of the world” (M. Lackey, Biographical Fiction. A Reader, p. 10). Biofiction is neither biography nor historical fiction and students attending this seminar are provided with the opportunity to explore distinctive features of all three genres and interrelations between them.

Students are invited to write their theses about representations of writers, artists, scientists, politicians, etc. and explore philosophical questions, intellectual points, and social issues conveyed and exposed in contemporary biographical fiction.