| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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with the often quoted comment of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this” (602). But Tinker’s use of the term “desires” clearly refers to more than only conscious thought. According to Jacques Lacan,
In the Lacanian post-structuralist sense, the desire of authors in successive generations to create their own representations of Rossetti may also explain why some choose biography and others fiction. The line, however, is not as distinct as it may seem. Ruth Hoberman explains in Modernizing Lives: “The narrative variations produced by biographical experimenters have fallen into three general categories: novelistic, mediated and psychosociological” (13). The novelistic biography, in which “the narrator is virtually omniscient and the subjects’ inner lives are open to scrutiny, their motives depicted and interpreted,” is of most interest in this study because some of the fictional works analyzed in this book, though intentionally defined by their authors as works of fiction, can well be labeled novelistic biographies and can be situated close to this nexus of genres (13). Moreover, fictional representations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti are created from the raw material of the biographies of him that began to appear almost immediately after his death and have continued to be produced ever since. In 2002 Fredeman summarized this output: “In the intervening 115 years since his death, at least 30 biographies and critical studies, hundreds of articles on his life, poetry, and art, and a dozen separate volumes of his correspondence have appeared” (Formative xxv). Of all these works there are only two