bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Virginia Woolf, Leslie Stephen, Julia Margaret Cameron, and the Prince of Abyssinia: Inquiry into Certain Colonialist Representations
Authors: Reid Panthea
Published: June 2010

Only a fragment of Virginia Woolf's 1940 account of the 1910 " Dreadnought Hoax " has survived. Her brother Adrian Stephen has little to say about her involvement. Thus her masquerade as a prince of Abyssinia has been open to wildly varied readings. However, a chain of connections between the political journalism of her father, Leslie Stephen, the photography of her great-aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron, nineteenth-century Anglo-Abyssinian history, and Virginia's 1910 work on her first novel, The Voyage Out , provides documentary evidence for the reasons behind her disguise. This evidence suggests that Virginia was aware of ways in which Abyssinians had been well- and mis-represented in words and images (some of which are reproduced here). The Abyssinian disguise which she and others adopted, then, can be read as a protest against colonialist stereotypes of Africans and as an expression of solidarity with a princely victim of English imperialism.
"Simple Words": Peter Ackroyd's Autobiography of Oscar Wilde
Authors: Moran Joe
Published: June 2010

This article discusses Peter Ackroyd's fictionalized autobiography, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde . It suggests that the text opens up significant questions about biographical and autobiographical interpretation, and more specific issues concerning the relationship between Wilde's own self-fashioning as a celebrated public figure and the social construction of sexualities in late nineteenth-century Britain.
Biography, Rhetoric, and Intellectual Careers: Writing the Life of Hannah Arendt
Authors: Weiland Steven
Published: June 2010

Elizabeth Young-Bruehl's biography of political philosopher Hannah Arendt is considered for its formal or rhetorical qualities. The design of the argument and elements of Young-Bruehl's own role in her text illustrate characteristic problems in and dimensions of intellectual biography. Arendt's own views about biography are incorporated into an account of her biographer's efforts to find a form suitable for representing her life and unusual scholarly career. Young-Bruehl's book is an example of resistance to some trends in biographical inquiry as well as a model for how the work may be done and the form itself made a subject of reflection.
The Will of Katherine Maynwaring: An Autobiographical Reading
Authors: Lafler Joanne
Published: June 2010

Katherine Maynwaring wrote her will in 1764, adding fourteen codicils over the next fifteen years. The result is a narrative of the last years in the life of a woman who would probably not have written her memoirs. The analysis argues that women's wills should be included among non-traditional autobiographical texts.
The Remasculinization of the Artist and Author in Ford Madox Ford's Life Writing
Authors: Kirschstein Bette H.
Published: June 2010

Ford Madox Ford's lifelong ambivalence about the "manliness" of his profession led him to a number of efforts to affirm his masculinity, the most sustained of which took place in his life writing. When famous artists and authors appear in his autobiography, memoirs, literary portraits, or biographical sketches, he often "remasculinizes" them, presenting them as conventionally, and sometimes exaggeratedly, virile.
Family Portrait: Churchills at Drink
Authors: Rintala Marvin
Published: June 2010

Many British politicians have been heavy drinkers. Winston Churchill was certainly among them, but his drinking was more an expression of his personality than of his occupational environment. The root of his drinking was the life-long depression caused by the coldness of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, himself a heavy drinker. Winston Churchill's heavy drinking was in turn reflected by that of three of his children, Diana, Sarah, and Randolph, all of whom lived and died in sad circumstances. The most helpful background for visualizing Winston Churchill at drink would therefore be his family circle, not his fellow politicians, except for F. E. Smith, his chief drinking companion. Assembling that family circle might have been difficult.
The Manikin and the Memorial Bronze: The Figure of Defacement in The Education of Henry Adams
Authors: Parkhurst Joseph
Published: June 2010

In The Education of Henry Adams , Adams enacts a series of deprivations by which, in effect, he effaces himself from the life-story and becomes illegible as an historical personage. In place of himself, he substitutes a caricature which figuratively corresponds to a text in that it reads like a palimpsest of political, scientific, and philosophical influences. Ultimately, Adams implies, these influences "write the story" of Henry Adams.
M. F. K. Fisher and the Embodiment of Desire: A Study in Autobiography and Food as Metaphor
Authors: Campbell Julie D.
Published: June 2010

Drawing on Kristeva's theory of the foreigner as other, this article explores how M.F.K. Fisher's exposure to European culture helped to form her tastes, desires, and views of the United States. An examination of her culinary metaphors reveals the way that food, symbolic of culture and personal taste, creates Barthe's "system of communication," signifying the symbiotic relationship between Fisher's writing about food and writing her life.
Elizabeth Gaskell's Ethnographic Imagination in The Life of Charlotte Brontë
Authors: Frawley Maria H.
Published: June 2010

This article examines ethnographic strategies and rhetoric invoked by Elizabeth Gaskell in her influencial biography, tracing its roots both to Charlotte Brontë's own self-representations and to a specific historical moment in mid-nineteenth-century British culture associated with imperialism abroad and with internal colonialism at home. The Life of Charlotte Brontë reveals the complex correspondence between the language and nostalgic impulses of the "biographer-persona" and the ethnographer, both situated at an important juncture of cultural history.
Pessoa, Life Narrative, and the Dissociative Process
Authors: Mahr Greg
Published: June 2010

The author describes the life story of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Central to Pessoa's creative work was a dissociative experience in which he became a series of "other" poets that he called heteronyms. The implications of dissociation for life narrative and the creative process are explored.
Self Found in the Breaking: The Life Writings of Harriet Strong
Authors: Albertine Susan
Published: June 2010

The archive of Harriet Strong (1844-1926) provides an extraordinary and representative narrative. Harriet Strong devoted 20 years to marriage, suffering a severe nervous disorder until age 40, when her husband committed suicide. She then became a celebrated entrepreneur. Her archive tells this story, but it resists being read as the record of an inner life. The papers of Harriet Strong suggest approaches to the life writings of publicly minded American careerwomen.
Heroes and Orphans: Testimonial Memory as Resistance and Repression in Francisco Róbles Perez's "Memorias"
Authors: Pérez Vincent
Published: June 2010

In seeking to recover and critically interpret the autobiography of his grandfather, the author both positions the work in relation to recent criticism on Mexican American life-writing-arguing that his grandfather's nostalgic memory of the mythic "colonial" world of his childhood operates as an empowering reassertion of cultural continuity and pride in the face of later sociocultural displacement and fragmentation as a Mexican immigrant in the U.S.-and shows how that narrative represses alternate versions of the hacienda sociocultural economy of his Mexican forebears.
God Bless Kitty Kelley, Or, Biography High and Low
Authors: Rollyson Carl
Published: June 2010

At the Biography Seminar on the New York University Campus, biographers debate the claim that there is little difference between the high and low of biography, between Richard Ellmann and Kitty Kelley. But there is much to be said for Kelley and a school of biography that is as reckless and dynamic as our greatest novelists.
Philip Larkin —An American View
Authors: Salwak Dale
Published: June 2010

Dale Salwak combines affectionate memories of his meetings and correspondence with the English poet Philip Larkin and personal enthusiasm for his work with a candid assessment of his reputation in America since the "revelations" of Andrew Motion's biography and Anthony Thwaite's edition of the Selected Letters . Should the revelations in any way deter us from wanting to read Larkin's work? Should they affect our assessment of the work, other than perhaps to open wider possibilities of interpretation? These are among the questions Salwak addresses as he examines some reactions to Larkin's life, work, and reputation since his passing.
The New Personalism
Authors: Rapaport Herman
Published: June 2010

Taking H. Aram Veeser's Confessions of the Critics as its text, this article discusses the new personalism in terms of a major contrast between older forms of personalist writing that emphasized the individual as a unique personality facing unique situations, and newer forms of personalist writings that emphasize the self as a typical or collectivized subject who is defined in terms of the banality of the everday. Among the authors reviewed are Michael Bérubé, Marianne Hirsch, Gillian Brown, Jane Tompkins, Candace Lang, Linda Orr, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Weber's Wilson: Living Off Political Science
Authors: Rintala Marvin
Published: June 2010

The external success of his political science career did not give Woodrow Wilson inner satisfaction. This failure can be explained by applying Max Weber's distinction between living off and living for one's work. Wilson lived off, but not also for, political science, which had for him only instrumental, not inherent, value.
Coleridge's Biographia : When is an Autobiography Not an Autobiography?
Authors: Jackson H. J.
Published: June 2010

Critical discussion of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria has been dogged by questions about its form and genre since the book was first published in 1817. This article aims to answer these questions by considering the historical conditions under which the work was published; certain distinctive features of Coleridge's project; and the conventions of autobiography at large.
Laurence Sterne and the Fantasy of Individual Patronage
Authors: Donoghue Frank
Published: June 2010

Laurence Sterne is remembered as one of eighteenth-century England's foremost writers of prose fiction, but he spent the first twenty-two years of his professional life trying to advance in the hierarchy of the Anglican Church. This essay focuses on his crucial transition from clergyman to novelist, and argues that he first employed the same strategies for self-promotion in the new field that were typical in the old. But Sterne's association with the actor David Garrick, and his adoption of Garrick's techniques for relating to a mass audience, turned his career in a new, distinctly modern direction.
Political Biography: A Polemical Review of the Genre
Authors: O'Brien Patrick K.
Published: June 2010

My "polemic" deals with the biographies of statesmen who operated in the context of established systems of law, conventions, and accountability, and not with dictators and more or less absolute monarchs. I argue that unless abiographer contextualizes his/her subject in order to deal with (a) problems of vaUdation; (b) the counterf actual problem of dispensability; and (c) connections between the "life" and the achievements, then the genre is not useful for understanding poUtical institutions, historical change, and the role of statesmen in history.
Marx and Keynes: The Primacy of Politics
Authors: Felix David
Published: June 2010

Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes saw themselves correctly as great economists. Yet it can be shown that they were actively political beings whose political ends dominated their ultimate economic statements in Capital and The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money respectively, and indeed contributed both to the genial vision and the deep flaws in these works.
"I Then Was What I Had Made Myself": Representation and Charlotte Charke
Authors: Churchill Sue
Published: June 2010

An account of Charke's life published in the Monthly Mirror in 1796 has been used to impose a tragic ending on her Narrative , obscuring the originality of her form, especially her use of comedy and comic representation of female character. Examined outside traditional forms and her celebrated role as her "father's daughter," Charke's work reveals unrecognized matriarchal themes.
Africa Real, Africa Ideal: A. Gordon Laing and the Noble Savage
Authors: Warms Richard L.
Published: June 2010

Much recent work in anthropology has focused on the positioning of the observer in the construction of texts. A. Gordon Laing's 1825 book of explorations is an example of the way in which an observer's preconceptions and home culture can influence observations. Though it provides interesting descriptions, Laing's work is prejudiced by his preconceptions. Laing, guided by romantic ideas of the noble savage and abolitionism, viewed groups as more or less desirable according to their proximity to Europeans.
Chateaubriand and Gérard
Authors: Dubé Pierre H.
Published: June 2010

The relationship between Chateaubriand and the painter Gérard, two giants of nineteenth-century France, is clouded in mystery. Conventional wisdom has it that their respect for each other was immense, and that Chateaubriand's selection of Gérard to paint the famous portrait of Saint Theresa was the result of his admiration for Gérard's genius. However, a close examination of the correspondence, memoirs, and journals of both men reveals that it was really their affection for Madame Récamier, more than any other factor, that was responsible for their association and for Chateaubriand's commissioning of Gérard.
Brigit of Kildare as She is: A Study of Biographical Image
Authors: Walker Stephanie Kirkwood
Published: June 2010

The life of this fifth-century Celtic saint has promoted the exploration of cultural concerns since her emergence in Irish literature in the seventh century. The fluidity of her image, from archaic fertility to current feminist forms, illustrates the ability of lifestory to interpret changing concepts of identity, social reality, and religious sensibility.
Detecting a Diary: A Case Study from 1905
Authors: Makkonen Anna
Published: June 2010

How can autobiography be distinguished from fiction when the author of the text is unknown? This case study in biography, autobiography, fiction, and criticism explores one reader's "biographical desire," awakened by an anonymous manuscript, written in diary form, depicting a summer in the life of a young girl in the Finnish countryside of 1905.
"The Caged Skylark": A Psychobiographical Portrait of G. M. Hopkins
Authors: Johnson George M.
Published: June 2010

A timely psychobiographical reevaluation of Gerard Manley Hopkins reveals that he suffered from manic-depression, with its accompanying characteristics. Through his poetry Hopkins attempted to adapt creatively to this condition, a strategy nowhere more evident that in the "dark" sonnets of 1885.
Deafness and Deftness in CODA Autobiography: Ruth Sidransky's In Silence and Lou Ann Walker's A Loss For Words
Authors: Adams Timothy Dow
Published: June 2010

This essay discusses two autobiographies by CODAs (Children of Deaf Adults) in which issues of language, naming, translation, and identity call into question some of autobiography's most basic questions. Parallels with native American autobiography, captivity narratives, and métissage help situate these narratives within a larger generic framework.
An Australian Pacifist: The Reverend Dr. Charles Strong, 1844-1942
Authors: Saunders Malcolm
Published: June 2010

The Reverend Dr. Charles Strong was the leading pioneer of the Australian peace movement. A Christian pacifist, his contribution to the establishment and growth of that movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was enormous. His involvement in peace-related activity spanned a period of the more than half a century from the Sudan campaign of 1885 to the Second World War.
Reading Lives to Live: Mortality, Introspection, and the Soteriological Impulse
Authors: Hutch Richard A.
Published: June 2010

Biography embodies and amplifies serious living. This is done not by a postmodern emphasis on studying individuals' "meanings" in living, but rather their "needs" and "acts," which together articulate two "laws of the mortal body," viz. the turnover of generations (mortality/natality) and gender complementarity (sexuality). Specific phenomenological accounting for these laws in the study of lives makes biographical studies a religious endeavour and also an inherently soteriological enterprise for researchers.
"Just like Rosa": History and Metaphor in the Life of a Seventeenth-Century Peruvian Saint
Authors: Morgan Ronald J.
Published: June 2010

Jacinto Morán de Butrón, the seventeenth-century hagiogragpher of St. Mariana de Jesús, compared his beloved "Lily of Quito" to the world-famous St. Rose of Lima. The metaphor of Rose and Lily had broader implications, however, reflecting the author's conscious desire to advertise the merits of his native province of Quito as a worthy companion to the more affluent and esteemed Lima.
What I Know of George Simson: Scrappy Notes for a Distant Biography of the Founder of Biography
Authors: Merle Gabriel
Published: June 2010

Through retracing the history of a relationship which began by a community of interests quickly developing into friendship, the author outlines the portrait of a man of strong convictions, who, he feels, has always been, as a private person, a scholar, and a citizen, a faithful servant to truth, freedom, and justice.
Life Writing/Death Writing: Biographical Versions of Poe's Final Hours
Authors: Peeples Scott
Published: June 2010

Given the prominence of death as a theme in Poe's fiction and poetry, as well as his career-long emphasis on "fact" as a textual construct, nothing could be more appropriate than a tradition of fabrication and speculation surrounding his own final hours.
Wilhelm Dilthey and Biography
Authors: Rickman H. P.
Published: June 2010

Wilhelm Dilthey analysed philosophically what was involved in biography and applied his theories in several biographies. He saw the job as combining the meaning the subject of the biography saw in his own life and expressed in words and deeds, with the biographer's view from outside, based on a study of the wider cultural and historical context.
Current Bibliography on Life-Writing
Authors: Winslow Donald J.
Published: June 2010

Garnered from scores of journal and publishers' lists, this annotated bibliography includes books and articles about biography, autobiography, and related aspects of life-writing in British and American publications during 1978-1979. The survey indicates, as did last year's, that new books and articles are concerned mainly with autobiography, although psychohistory and psychobiography continue to be favorite subjects.
The Basic Assumptions of Literary Biography
Authors: Nagourney Peter
Published: June 2010

The difficulties of writing a literary biography only begin with awareness of the complexity of any human subject and the uncertainties of biographical and historical research. The basic assumptions upon which the genre of literary biography is based, assumptions about the unity, development, and anecdotal nature of life, can be seen to reflect the psychological pressures and practical demands of research, writing, and publication as much as they reflect, or are able to reflect, the truth about the subject's inner life.
A Multicultural Global Culture: Not a Question of When, But How: Some Roads to Cultural Integration for Peace
Authors: Galtung Johan
Published: June 2010

The paper compares multilingual and multicultural competence and identifies a number of similarities. One of them is the capacity of children to learn languages and cultures, provided the competence comes from significant others like friends rather than through a formal school system. Two parents may well raise their children in two languages and two cultures, but one parent is advised not to switch. The author's own family biography, and Hawai'i, are used as examples. Better passive knowledge of other languages and cultures than none at all; and general softening of cultures is more peace productive than one global culture.
Virginia Woolf Revising Roger Fry Into the Frames of "A Sketch of the Past"
Authors: Johnston Georgia
Published: June 2010

Influenced by the aesthetic theories of Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf added an interrupting frame to "A Sketch of the Past." The frame presents a series of present-day "I"s that undermine the coherence of the subject who lived that past. Thus Woolf redefines the literary spectator and invalidates a retrospective, unified, authoritative subject.
Shifting Gears in Life History Research: The Case of an Assimilated American Jewish Woman in Palestine/Israel, 1989-1991
Authors: Weinbaum Batya
Published: June 2010

Superficial identification of interests can exist across borders, lifestyles, and political beliefs. It can also leave those who collect life histories vulnerable to well-spun, innccurate metaphors. An American Jewish feminist scholar examines her own oral history research in Israel to show how, following an initial identification, her categories of analysis.
Keynes and the Bloomsbury Group
Authors: Annan Noel
Published: June 2010

John Maynard Keynes was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, but both the Strachey clan and the Stephen sisters (Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf) had reservations about him. They feared that his success in life as a public figure had caused him to betray the ideals of the Group. Noel Annan considers whether this was so.
The Coincidence of Biography and Autobiography: Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë
Authors: Helms Gabriele
Published: June 2010

A biography can also be read as an autobiography of the biographer-persona whose creation is recognized as a biography's core device. The case study of Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë shows how a profile of this persona can be (re)constructed as she writes her own self into the story of Charlotte's life.
Beyond the Birds of Appetite: Thomas Merton's Encounter with Zen
Authors: Fader Larry A.
Published: June 2010

An aspect of Father Thomas Merton's career which is not well known is his encounter with Zen and one of its most important interpreters to the West, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki. The encounter is delineated and its results in terms of Merton's "integrative" approach to inter-religious dialogue critically appraised.
The Study of Life-Writing in Japan: A Partially Annotated Bibliography of Japanese Books and Articles on Biography and Autobiography, 1922-1979, with an Introduction
Authors: Zoll Daniel R.
Published: June 2010

Good life-writing is a relatively recent development in Japan, as is the study of life-writing. This bibliography of Japanese books and articles on life-writing spans the years from 1922 to 1979 and lists works that concern the history, theory, and application in education of life-writing in Japan and the West.
Biography, Conspiracy, and the Oswald Enigma
Authors: Keener John F.
Published: June 2010

Biography as a narrative mode is in direct opposition to conspiracy narrative, which by definition decenters the life story in favor of a more diffuse subject. In the case of Lee Harvey Oswald, telling a life story becomes a politically charged act. Among writers seeking to explain the enormous event of the Kennedy assassination, such narratives often become very diffuse indeed . . . and very unbiographical.
Carrington and Strachey
Authors: Holroyd Michael
Published: June 2010

Michael Holroyd revisits the world of Bloomsbury and investigates the complex relationship between Lytton Strachey and the painter Dora Carrington. He concludes that Strachey's life was at one with his writings, and that both illustrate a moral reaction from the sexual repression that had flourished in late Victorian Britain when Strachey was growing up.
Bibliography of Works About Life-Writing
Authors: Wachter Phyllis E.
Published: June 2010

This year's bibliography of works about life-writing (the eleventh in the series that began with Biography 8:4, Fall 1985) reveals that people are using an increasingly wide range of life-writing mediums to struggle with a variety of political, social, familial, cultural, and psychological issues as the line between autobiography and biography continues to blur.
Suicide and Literary Biography: The Case of Hemingway
Authors: Sanderson Richard K. , Sanderson Rena
Published: June 2010

A writer's suicide confronts his or her biographers with special problems and opportunities. Drawing primarily on biographies of Ernest Hemingway for its examples, this article examines the narrative and rhetorical strategies often employed to present literary lives that end in suicide.
Biography in College
Authors: Bartlett Donald
Published: June 2010

The author draws upon his years of teaching biography in college to argue the value of the study of biography as an antidote to quantitative studies of mass phenomena which should be modified by re-emphasizing the human factor.
Telling Bret Harte's Story: Putting Theory into Biographical Practice
Authors: Nissen Axel
Published: June 2010

The author discusses how biographical, historical, and narrative theory empowered him to explore new modes of biographical discourse and organization in his literary biography of Bret Harte. He discusses his new "scenic method," his use of consistent narration, and other means of achieving a greater degree of selectivity, interiority, and polyphony of perspective without violating the grounding principles of scholarly biography.
Adlai E. Stevenson-His Editor's View
Authors: Johnson Walter
Published: June 2010

The editor of eight volumes of Stevenson's Papers conveys a sense of the fabric as well as design of Stevenson's life, including his intense desire to learn more about the human condition, his constant probing to get behind the superficial, his unfailing good spirits, his ambivalence toward a second marriage, and his decisiveness in matters of high government policy.
Specimen Daze: Whitman's Photobiography
Authors: Meehan Sean
Published: June 2010

Whitman's use of photography throughout his career plays a key role in the conception of his work's autobiographical nature. Focusing on and around his prose autobiography Specimen Days (1882), this essay argues that Whitman incorporates photography (in both image and word) to produce a faithful version of his autobiography, but at the same time, that Whitman writes with an understanding of the dynamic play of the process of photographic representation that serves to question the accuracy and completion presumed in photographs. In Specimen Days , Whitman thus uses photography against its own positivist grain, provoking the recognition of the relationship between the positive identity represented and the means of its representation.
Autobiography
Authors: Seidensticker Edward
Published: June 2010

The essay chiefly explores difficulties in writing autobiography and relations between autobiography and other autobiographic forms, such as diary, memoir, and autobiographic fiction, as well as differences between autobiography and biography. It also remarks upon different kinds of autobiography.
Nation, Family, and Language in Victor Perera's Rites and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior
Authors: Hunsaker Steven V.
Published: June 2010

Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Victor Perera's Rites: A Guatemalan Boyhood present personal identity in terms of belonging to a national community different from that of one's parents. Immigrant parents complicate the creation of identity by compelling their children to create space between themselves and tradition in order to move into the nation. Rather than a sense of shared community, it is in both cases a power to exclude others that defines national identity.
Ben Jonson's Poverty
Authors: Teague Frances
Published: June 2010

No solid evidence exists to show Ben Jonson died in poverty. The best known tale about Jonson's death is apocryphal. Other evidence suggests he had a major financial crisis in 1629. On August 6, 1637, he died apparently owing less than nine pounds, which he could have paid the following quarter day, September 29.
Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli: An Accommodating Personality in the Politics of Confrontation
Authors: Coppa Frank J.
Published: June 2010

This article examines the personality and policies of Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, the controversial Secretary of State of Pope Pius IX. Commencing with the polemical picture of the Cardinal that has persisted to the present, an attempt is made to objectively assess the career and character of the most important Minister of Pius IX and his role during the course of the Counter-Risorgimento.
Jung Wien : Growing Up in the World of Yesterday
Authors: Marquis Alice Goldfarb
Published: June 2010

Viennese intellectuals at the turn of the century were unable to act because for this whole group adolescence never ended. Their upbringing blinded them to the realities of mass culture and kept them perpetually, and brilliantly, diagnosing their society's disease-while the patient died.
The Hero as Woman of Letters: Anna Jameson Revises Her Girlhood
Authors: Johnston Judith
Published: June 2010

In Anna Jameson's "A Revelation of Childhood" she revises her childhood to accord with the current ideology of the day, but also to construct herself as a professional writer in competition with Ruskin and Carlyle. She uses two conventions of biography and autobiography to achieve this: hagiography and the concept of piety.
Gandhi as Leader: A Plutarchan Perspective
Authors: Paige Glenn D.
Published: June 2010

This paper explores the criteria used for judging leaders by asking how Plutarch might have evaluated Gandhi. In particular, the author addresses the extension of categories developed for a martial or violence-accepting society to a nonviolent leader.
Radio and Biography
Authors: Dunaway David King
Published: June 2010

Scholars and authors sometimes lament that broadcast versions of written biographies are inaccurate or simplistic. This essay considers the intellectual dilemmas of presenting lives in broadcast formats, particularly radio, focusing on audience, function, and representation. How much fiddling with facts and milieu is permissible in the adaptive process? How can writers ensure integrity of their material when broadcast?
Being Definitive: Jefferson Biography Under The Shadow of Dumas Malone
Authors: Shuffelton Frank
Published: June 2010

The term "definitive" is often used loosely, but by looking at the way in which Dumas Malone's six-volume biography, Jefferson and His Time , displaced earlier biographies of Jefferson we can better understand what this label might signify. Furthermore, by examining the relationship between Malone's work and subsequent biographies of Jefferson we can gauge the power of a definitive biography to shape, limit, or encourage later life studies of the subject.
Albert Einstein-In Remembrance
Authors: Shankland R. S.
Published: June 2010

A marked change in Einstein's attitude towards the quantum theory, to which he had contributed so much, occured soon after the world-wide acclaim accorded his General Theory of Relativity when the 1919 eclipse observations confirmed his predictions on the deflection of starlight by the sun. His own efforts were then directed almost exclusively to extending the General Theory to a more comprehensive Unified Field Theory.
Preacher, Populist, Propagandist: The Early Career of Gerald L. K. Smith
Authors: Jeansonne Glen
Published: June 2010

Gerald L. K. Smith, born and reared in Wisconsin and educated in Indiana, served as a Christian minister before becoming Huey P. Long's Share Our Wealth Society organizer in 1934. Protestant Fundamentalism and political populism and progressivism prepared Smith for political activism. His evolution from radicalism to reaction is examined and the apparent disjunction explained.
The Hephaestus Complex: Power Themes in the Life of James Thurber
Authors: Bigda-Peyton Frances , Fine Gary Alan
Published: June 2010

The life of American humorist James Thurber is examined in terms of the themes of need for power. It is argued that Thurber's life and writings exhibit a marked ambivalence toward power. This ambivalence is expressed in four power subthemes: 1) dread of powerlessness, seen in anxiety about losing power and being subject to the power of others; 2) apprehensiveness about the possession of personal power arising from fear of its possible negative consequences; 3) ambivalent feelings about women's dominance; and 4) a desire to become the center of attention and to gain power by playing the fool and dramatizing weakness, a subtheme termed the Hephaestus Complex. It is argued that the Hephaestus Complex is a psychological phenomenon common to comedians and humorists.
Writing George Eliot's Biography
Authors: Karl Frederick R.
Published: June 2010

Even in writing about a traditional subject like George Eliot, the biographer must seek innovative ways of presenting her. Such innovations include an entire array of contexts: cultural, personal, historical, critical, psychological. The biographer here decided that a psychological approach, while eschewing all narrowing systems, was the preferable way to integrate Eliot's life and work.
Postmodern Biography: Lively Hypotheses and Dead Certainties
Authors: Lambert Carole J.
Published: June 2010

Traditional biographies, resembling the nineteenth century realistic novel, provide a unifying effect that postmodernists call a "metanarrative." This essay introduces French theoretician Francis Vanoye's observations about postmodern biography, analyzes Simon Schama's Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) as an example of this genre, and weighs the advantages and disadvantages of this innovative approach.
Biographies of Women
Authors: Peters Margot
Published: June 2010

Biographers of women have often distorted the lives of their subjects by accepting stereotyped and sexist notions of feminine social and psychological behavior or, conversely, by ignoring the effect of gender on women's lives altogether. Lives of Charlotte Brontë illustrate these biases of past biographers, as well as current feminist attempts at reinterpretation.
John Buchan and Twentieth-Century Biography
Authors: Brown Barbara B.
Published: June 2010

Criticism of twentieth-century English and American biography often focuses on "The New Biography" movement while neglecting writers like John Buchan, 1875-1940. Buchan's biographical achievements and the critical acclaim accorded him in both England and America attest to the advance during this period of the tradition of life-writing established by Johnson and Boswell.
Glossary of Terms in Life-Writing, Part II
Authors: Winslow Donald J.
Published: June 2010

The "Glossary," Part II, is a continuation of the reference-list of terms used in connection with biography, autobiography, and other branches of life-writing. Most of the entries are based on the Oxford English Dictionary , although some are modern coinages. The "Glossary" has an unavoidable British and American bias. The author invites commentary. Part I appeared in the first issue of Biography .
Babar and the Mission Civilisatrice : Colonialism and the Biography of a Mythical Elephant
Authors: O'Harrow Stephen
Published: June 2010

Illustrated in a series of events in the fictional early life of the "King of the Elephants," author Jean de Brunhoff (1899-1937) created Babar, a multifarious character, facets of which have charmed juvenile as well as adult readers, both in French and in foreign translation, for several generations. The humanity and bourgeois domesticity of de Brunhoff's pachydermal universe, however, mask a basically colonialist perception of the world, one which accurately reflected the de Brunhoffs' social milieu, the zeitgeist in the first third of the twentieth century, and Republican France's complex attitudes towards being a colonial power.
Sources for a Neglected Masterpiece: Paul Schrader's Mishima
Authors: Wilson John Howard
Published: June 2010

Though little known, Paul Schrader's film about Yukio Mishima provides a model for cinematic biography. Mishima 's distinction stems partly from a wide range of sources, such as other films, novels, and biographies. Cinematic styles separate and connect Mishima's life and art, as biographical scenes alternative with scenes from the work.
Bibliography of Works about Life-Writing for the Early '90s
Authors: Wachter Phyllis E.
Published: June 2010

As the entries in this year's bibliography suggest, it seems as though everyone has a story to tell, whether it be a narrative about the self or the "life-story" of some other. What makes the human experience so varied may be, in fact, the ways in which each individual chooses to depict that individuality. The medium may differ, be it video, work of art, dance, musical composition, one's home, poetry, fiction, curriculum guide, literary criticism, empirical study, or one of the so-called "traditional" life-writing mediums such as biography and autobiography, but the need to be seen, heard, and recognized as the unique beings we think we are is always present.
Unmasking Another Villain in Conrad Aiken's Autobiographical Dream
Authors: Womack Kenneth
Published: June 2010

The role of British poet and novelist Martin Armstrong as a fictionalized character in Conrad Aiken's controversial volume Ushant remains unexplicated in the mélange of criticism dedicated to unraveling the vague threads of Aiken's autobiography. Once Aiken's treasured guide and friend, Armstrong terminated his twenty-year friendship with Aiken in 1929 when he married Aiken's estranged first wife, Jessie McDonald. Using unpublished personal correspondence, this essay reveals Aiken's carefully structured attack on Armstrong in Ushant , as well as the unusual biographical factors that motivated Aiken's desire for revenge.
Getting Modern: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Authors: Barros Carolyn A.
Published: June 2010

With The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , Gertrude Stein radically alters the history of autobiography. Stein effects the shift to modernist autobiography by eschewing the romantic conception of the self—a set of feelings and internal motives—to construct herself as a modernist work of art, a collage of multiple identities, a multi-perspectival "Master-piece."
The Humanistic and Pluralistic Quest: Theory as Biography and Testament
Authors: Schwarz Daniel R.
Published: June 2010

My essay relates my life to my work as a humanistic critic, and argues that my theoretical and critical perspective is a kind of life-writing. Strands of my life coalesce in my pluralistic perspective and in my choice of subjects for my critical work: Conrad, Joyce, Disraeli, Stevens, Woolf, and Lawrence. I consider in particular how a Jewish perspective informs my work, and examine that perspective in relation to my arguing for a revised humanistic criticism that insists that texts are by human authors for human readers about human subjects, and that is interested in how and why people think, write, act, and ultimately live.
Namtar : The Tradition of Biography in Tibet: An Interview
Authors: Zangpo Khetsun
Published: June 2010

Biography has been a widely practiced form of literature in Tibet for centuries. Khetsun Zangpo Rinpoche, in an interview, discusses its importance, history, subjects and approaches, including that of his own work. The subject's actualization of philosophical view receives major emphasis in the Tibetan genre.
Raising Adam: Ethnicity, Disability, and the Ethics of Life Writing in Michael Dorris's The Broken Cord
Authors: Couser G. Thomas
Published: June 2010

Michael Dorris's The Broken Cord (1989) combines elements of several life writing genres—for example, Native American autobiography, autoethnography, parental memoir, and disability memoir. Its mixture of genres raises questions about the ethics of parental life writing and the representation of people with disabilities. Ultimately, despite its reformist intentions, the book echoes rather than revises traditional inscriptions of race and disability.
Mr. Rushdie and Mrs. Gandhi
Authors: Frank Katherine
Published: June 2010

The libel suit brought by Indira Gandhi against Salman Rushdie in 1984, after the publication of Midnight's Children , was not merely the culmination of a personal and literary quarrel. With hindsight we can see that it raises key issues connected with the writing of biography concerning biographical authority, the fictional appropriation of history, political accountability, and the peculiar vulnerability of Indian widows.
Colonial Background and Leadership in World War I: The Tragic Case of Gallieni
Authors: Singer Barnett
Published: June 2010

A colonial background is sometimes seen as irrelevant for a technologically advanced conflict. But the career of Joseph Gallieni, a great French imperial figure, shows how that background helped make him a valuable strategist and leader for World War I. The tragedy is how he was underutilized in that war.
Cross-Dressing for (Imaginary) Battle: Vita Sackville-West's Biography of Joan of Arc
Authors: Sproles Karyn Z.
Published: June 2010

This article explores Sackville-West's transferential relationship with Joan of Arc through a close textual analysis of the rhetorical devices the biographer uses to repress challenges to her identification with her biographical subject—an identification that centers around conflicts in feminine sexuality and gender identity.
The Voice of Arii Taimai: Henry Adams and the Challenge of Empire
Authors: Manheim Daniel L.
Published: June 2010

This article represents Henry Adams as distinctly divided on the question of imperialism. In his memoir about the last chiefess of Tahiti, he found a narrative that at once provided a just representation of his subject and silenced a narrative that implicated himself as biographer in his family's imperialist project.
Probing the Origins of Literary Biography: English and Russian Versions
Authors: Makolkin Anna
Published: June 2010

Tracing the origins of biography to funeral songs and narratological structures used in mourning, this article explores the origins of literary and nonliterary biography, and provides suggestions about the origins of other literary genres which the author sees as coming from biography. A comparative analysis of Greek, Roman, English, and Russian biographical traditions suggests narrative generic invariants which transcend time, geography, religion, and linguistic code, and manifest themselves in the biographical changes through preheroic, heroic, antiheroic, and postheroic stages. The article also explores the impact of dominant social beliefs upon biography and the relationship between society and biography, and addresses the problem of a specific biographical subject—the poet—and the more advanced stages of biographical writing which seem to be found in all cultures.
The Curious Pattern of a Distinguished Medical Career: A Psychoanalytic Portrait of Edith B. Jackson
Authors: Silberman Sara Lee
Published: June 2010

Though honored by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics at the end of her career, Dr. Edith B. Jackson was past fifty before she reached her professional potential. She floundered in her sixties and experienced a professional revival in her seventies. This essay offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of that curious pattern and, in the process, suggests some questions and hypotheses that become available to biographers who pursue the psychological, as well as the more traditional, underpinnings of their subjects' lives.
Life Writing in Mainland China (1949-1993): A General Survey and Bibliographical Essay
Authors: Di Feng , Shao Dongfang
Published: June 2010

This article provides a general survey and bibliograhical notes of life writing since the founding of the People's Republic of China. It examines the background, nature, scope and problems of biography in contemporary China and suggests that future amelioration of life writing depends on the transformation of Chinese society.
Biography and Autobiography in Eliza Butler's Sheridan, A Ghost Story
Authors: Peacock Sandra J.
Published: June 2010

Eliza Butler's 1931 biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan anticipates current debates in the art of lifewriting. Her experiments with narrative and thematic structures prefigure recent biographical strategies, and her musings on the relationship between past and present parallel current concerns. When read with her own autobiography, Butler's Sheridan reveals a lively interplay between biographer and subject.
A Good Country Gentlewoman: Catherine Clive's Epistolary Autobiography
Authors: Bradham JoAllen
Published: June 2010

Unable to play the gentlewoman on stage, Catherine Clive lived the part in retirement. Her letters document the days and ways of the gentlewoman, Clive's need to assume the role, and the actress's awareness that she performs. In all details, Clive's gentlewoman conforms to contemporary expectations of that figure.
Management's Unsung Theorist: An Examination of the Works of Lillian M. Gilbreth
Authors: Sullivan Sherry E.
Published: June 2010

Dr. Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878-1972) was a researcher, a management consultant, a university professor, and a working mother. She advanced management theory by introducing a humanistic approach to the field of scientific management. She emphasized training, motivating, and improving the quality of life of the average worker long before these ideas came into vogue. As a consultant and university professor, she worked for the advancement of women, the handicapped, and older workers.
The Two Faces of Jonathan Belcher: An Exercise in Biography as Synthesis
Authors: Batinski Michael C.
Published: June 2010

Jonathan Belcher's behavior as governor of Massachusetts and New Hampshire (1730-41) is explained by examining formative family experiences. By illustrating connections between private and public life, this essay serves to integrate social and political history, and thereby demonstrates the advantages gained from writing history from a biographical perspective.
Holocaust Chronicle, Spiritual Autobiography, Portrait of an Artist, Novel in the Making: Reading the Abridged Diary of Etty Hillesum
Authors: Makkonen Anna
Published: June 2010

Critical discussion of Etty Hillesum's diary has mostly concentrated on the Holocaust. This essay emphasizes the literariness of An Interrupted Life —symbols, metaphors, intertexts, and the sense of coherence—and examines the diary's relationship to spiritual autobiography, the bildungsroman, and (meta)fiction. Addressing simplified notions of the diary as a genre, the author argues that the "novelization" created by the act of publishing a (literary) diary is the product of the interplay between the scripts of the diarist, the editor, and the reader alike.
Black Biography in the Service of a Revolution: Martin R. Delany in Afro-American Historiography
Authors: Adeleke Tunde
Published: June 2010

The paper examines how utilitarian and ideological considerations influenced biographical and other critical studies of Martin R. Delany, 1812-1885, resulting in the portrayal of a personality fundamentally different from the historical Delany. It underscores the pragmatic and complex character of Delany, and strongly urges a re-examination.
The Last Emperor : A "History Lesson" and a Lesson in History
Authors: Lu James J.
Published: June 2010

A biographical account can easily slip into a romanticized legend, wherein the experience of a peripheral—though also historical—figure can be casually sacrificed for the popularization of the central character. Yet the "peripheral" position of a figure in one biography is only temporal, for with a switch of the narrative focus, another biography may instantly spotlight him/her at its "center," thus revealing the sacrifice (including distortions) inflicted upon this character by the earlier text.