Abstract
"Biographic metafiction" is a term used to denote novels whose theme is the exploration of the process of biographical writing. The main protagonist either decides or is commissioned to compose a biography of another person and, despite his/her serious and strenuous efforts, eventually in some way fails in this project.
Biographic metafiction is a category of historiographic metafiction as it also draws on postmodernist and poststructuralist doubt concerning the availability of historical truth and the consequent impossibility of its appropriate representation in language. The genre has been especially popular since the 1980s, though far less so than works dealing with history and getting to know the past in general.
Using the most exemplary biographic metafiction in British literature of the past three decades, this article shows both the genre's characteristic features as well as the differences between its individual representatives, and also compares it with a thematically related body of contemporary fiction known as "romances from the archive".