Marguerite Yourcenar's Hadrian: History or Fiction?

Keith Bradley: Marguerite Yourcenar's Hadrian: History or Fiction?

Keith Bradley is the author of the recent "Marguerite Yourcenar's Hadrian: Writing the Life of A Roman Emperor" (University of Toronto Press, 2024), a study of Yourcenar's acclaimed novel, "Memoirs of Hadrian". In this talk he will describe how he came to write the book, discuss the issues involved in finding history in a historical novel, and show how Yourcenar's work succeeds as a form of Roman imperial biography.