Metaphorized (Not Real) Lives in Hong Ying’s K: The Art of Love

Abstract: Because biofictionalists name their protagonist after a real person, many wrongly assume that their works are an effort to represent the taken-from-life figure with as much accuracy as possible. By analyzing Hong Ying’s K: The Art of Love , which is part biofiction (Julian Bell, son of Vanessa Bell and nephew of Virginia Woolf, is one of the protagonists) and part roman à clef (Lin is another protagonist, and she is very loosely based on the famous Chinese writer, Ling Shuhua), Lackey demonstrates that fiction writers metaphorize rather than represent the lives of real people, thus offering a more rigorous and grounded model for analyzing and assessing biofictions and roman à clefs and distinguishing them from biography and life-writing.