Biofiction and Fictional Metabiography in Richard Beard’s Lazarus is Dead

Abstract

Richard Beard’s Lazarus is Dead constructs its hybrid biography–biofiction out of the remnants of the biblical Lazarus’s afterlife; the ways that Lazarus was remembered in art and literature are mined as if they hold the key to autobiographical truth. Reading this novel as an example of a fictional metabiography, to use Ansgar Nünning’s typology of biofictions, sheds light on the way that the novel deconstructs the processes of life writing. What Beard posits in Lazarus is Dead is an epistemology of the biography that places the fictional process at the center of all forms of life writing.