bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Autobiography and Biography: Leicester Hemingway's The Sound of the Trumpet
Authors: Langenfeld Robert
Published: June 2010

Leicester Hemingway, Ernest's only brother, wrote My Brother in 1962, but almost a decade before he published an autobiographical novel, The Sound of the Trumpet . This work offers an interesting vantage point for students of biography. Readers not only see how autobiography supplements and confirms what is known about Ernest Hemingway, but how the autobiographical perspective offers Leicester the authorial distance and confidence to reveal what he cannot say in a biography.
Oscar Wilde's Aesthetic of the Self: Art as Imaginative Self-Realization in De Profundis
Authors: Buckler William E.
Published: June 2010

In De Profundis , Oscar Wilde tries to make his audience aware of the incalculable possibilities inherent in the mystery of the self. He defines art as "the conversion of an idea into an image," and in this carefully constructed literary epistle, he attempts to see himself "in his real as in his ideal relations"—that is, as imaginatively or symbolically as possible.
Eric Kennington and Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Reassessment
Authors: Plotke A. J.
Published: June 2010

The relationship and artistic alliance between T. E. Lawrence and Eric Kennington has been grossly underestimated in the years since Seven Pillars of Wisdom's 1926 publication. Using hitherto unpublished letters from Lawrence to Kennington, their collaboration is re-assessed in order to better understand the genesis of this monumental work.
Bibliography of Works about Life-Writing for the Early '90s
Authors: Wachter Phyllis E.
Published: June 2010

The entries in this year's bibliography are characterized by both trends of juncture and separatism. We see overlap between biography and autobiography, selves shaped by their narrative artistic forms, and biographies informed by their given life-writers' own lives. We also see life-writings of individuals who are distinctive in their ethnic, racial, and feminist consciousnesses. These, along with other voices outside the mainstream such as the elderly, the physically/sexually abused, the religiously persecuted, and lesbians and gay men, join with victims of class discrimination to form a continuum of suffering and hope which spans the ages. Ultimately, it is the story as well as its variable modes of representation which both binds and alienates their respective tellers one from the other.
The Viscous Thought: Henry Adams and the American Character
Authors: Sutherland Daniel E.
Published: June 2010

This article suggests a new interpretation of the meaning and purpose of The Education of Henry Adams . The Education is Adams's last effort to come to grips with a concept he had pursued throughout his career as a historian: the American national character. His inability to explain the link between national character and historical evolution led Adams to judge his lifelong quest for "education" a failure.
Thomas Paine: American Founder and Political Scientist
Authors: Kiley Michael M.
Published: June 2010

Thomas Paine was a Founder of America and one of our first political scientists. Acrimony after 1791 reversed the esteem of the 1770's and 1780's. Paine had gained wide political experience in England and gave to the founding many practical ideas and deep loyalty. He was also one of our first political scientists and did econometric, sociometric and political analysis.
Maxine Hong Kingston's Autobiographical Strategy in The Woman Warrior
Authors: Fong Bobby
Published: June 2010

The Woman Warrior distends the traditional form of autobiography by its reliance on multiple protagonists, the circularity of its structure, and its use of myth and story. It expands our perception of what materials and techniques can be used to construct a useable past.
An Artist's Formative Years: Copley's Education in Boston
Authors: Klayman Richard
Published: June 2010

This article explores the childhood education of colonial Boston's premier portrait painter, John Singleton Copley. Copley's family is credited with nurturing and supporting his artistic inclinations. In addition, the Boston public schools encouraged basic education for children such as Franklin, Revere, and Copley. And finally, Copley benefited form a private school master, his stepfather Peter Pelham.
Interpreting Hawthorne: Subjectivity in Biography
Authors: Erlich Gloria C.
Published: June 2010

In observing the attentive processes by which I reached interpretations of Nathaniel Hawthorne's life and fiction, I found surprising congruence between Hawthorne's identity themes and my own. Properly tempered psychoanalytic interpretative techniques such as "evenly hovering attention" and "disciplined subjectivity" help bridge the gap between even quite different personalities.
Edward Burne-Jones and Nineteenth-Century Fear of Women
Authors: Kestner Joseph
Published: June 2010

The painter Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1888) reveals in his art a preoccupation with a key manifestation of nineteenth-century culture, misogyny. This fear of women derives from several experiences, particularly his affair with Maria Zambaco during the late 1860s and early 1870s. His early stories and his association with Rossetti indicate tendencies that later were manifest in a narcissistic hatred of women that is most obvious in his Perseus cycle and in his paintings of women as femmes fatales such as the mermaid and Nimuë. The sesquicentennial of his birth is an appropriate time to reconsider his life vis-à-vis this cultural manifestation.
The 1993 Biography Reader Questionnaire and Remarks
Authors: Ludeman Ann
Published: June 2010

Questions about journal content and areas for improvement elicited a wide variety of comments from the 50 respondents who returned questionnaires, but we found no apparent consensus in these areas. Not surprisingly, the profession of the respondents correlated with how they use Biography , how they perceive the journal's quality, and which features they find most valuable. Following the remarks is a detailed compilation of 50 subscribers' responses to items on the questionnaire. Of special interest are lists of readers' "all-time favorite biographies" and "most valuable recent biographies."
Cognitive Processes and Autobiographical Acts
Authors: Siebenschuh William R.
Published: June 2010

In an autobiography or any text heavily dependent upon its author's memory, the normal operation of the common cognitive processes of memory and perception may be the cause of literary effects we are used to attributing to "artistic choice" or an author's intention. Use of selected knowledge from the cognitive sciences may significantly enhance our ability to explain and interpret autobiographical texts and may even provide new insight into the creative process.
Autobiography and Memory: The Case of Lillian Hellman
Authors: Brown Maurice F.
Published: June 2010

Hellman wrestles with the conflicting demands of life as personal history and life as art; the role of memory in identity definition; and the relation of writer/protagonist to her past selves and to the participatory reader. Hellman's complex contemporary style represents a significant realization of the potential of autobiography as a literary form.
Kipling and Forster: A Case for Dual Biography
Authors: Hay Eloise Knapp
Published: June 2010

Kipling's politics and Forster's homosexuality made reception of their writings difficult during their lifetimes as recent biographies have made clear. The two writers seem, in F. Schlegel's terms, like "two spirits [who] should reunite as two halves that have been separated." It is "only together that they become all that they can be. . . . All that is lacking in one writer is found in [the other]."
The Paranoid Theme in the Career of José Gaspar de Francia of Paraguay
Authors: Robins Robert S. , Handler Jeffrey
Published: June 2010

This essay evaluates the alleged paranoia of the nineteenth century Paraguayan dictator, José Gaspar de Francia. Francia was highly suspicious in his rise to power, but not pathologically so. Prudent though brutal preemption would best describe his behavior up to about the age of fifty. Afterwards, this suspiciousness developed into a paranoidal personality disorder, and perhaps into the psychosis of paranoia.
Changing Faces of Heroism: Some Questions Raised by Contemporary Autobiography
Authors: Egan Susanna
Published: June 2010

Autobiography has most commonly been a matter of lengthy retrospect on a dignified life and has assumed appropriately heroic patterns. Many contemporary autobiographies, in contrast, describe unfinished crises in the undervalued lives of minorities and need, accordingly, to evolve new patterns for autobiography. Defining and valuing one's own perspective and life represent a modern form of heroism.
Samuel Johnson, Scepticism, and Biography
Authors: Maner Martin
Published: June 2010

Johnson's sceptical approach to biography is a dialectic by which Johnson engages the reader in testing the limits of biographical inference. This biographical scepticism derives from the scientific epistemologies of Locke and Bacon, the writings of Pierre Bayle, and the "constructive scepticism" of the seventeenth-century Christian apologists.
Myth in the Lives of Leaders of Social Movements: The Case of the Family Planning Movement
Authors: Back Kurt W.
Published: June 2010

The biography of heroic figures depends on the nature of the heroic role as well as on actual life events; even biographies of current heroes and heroines are subject to this process. A typology of life stories according to content and purpose delineates the place of myth, biography and life course analysis. The life stories of the founding figures of the family planning movement are examined to show the modeling of the main life events of the biographies into the heroic model.
Narrative Duplicity and Women in Edmund Gosse's Father and Son
Authors: Hoberman Ruth
Published: June 2010

In Father and Son , Gosse asserts the right of his subject to imaginative freedom, but as narrator never embraces this freedom fully himself. Instead he sup­presses his narrative power while asserting the authoritativeness of his account. This simultaneous rejection of power and assertion of authority is facilitated by Gosse's use of women, who provide an analogy for his paradoxical position as victim and victor, as rebel against and invoker of established authority.
Evelyn's Life of Mrs. Godolphin and the Hagiographical Tradition
Authors: Redford Bruce
Published: June 2010

John Evelyn's Life of Mrs. Godolphin has most frequently been interpreted as a prefiguration of Boswellian achievements in psychological portraiture. A more revealing generic approach looks backward rather than forward: the biography represents a deliberate reworking of the late antique and medieval saint's life. In short, hagiographic convention best accounts for the distinctive traits of the Life of Mrs. Godolphin .
Eugene O'Neill in Mourning
Authors: Black Stephen A.
Published: June 2010

Following the deaths in 1920-1923 of his father, mother, and brother, Eugene O'Neill spends most of his adult life in mourning. The more one understands the course of his mourning, the better the plays may be known. Indeed, major aspects of the plays remain almost inscrutable until one grasps the author's underlying preoccupation.
Essaying Biography
Authors: Edel Leon
Published: June 2010

In acknowledging the publication of a festschrift honoring his distinguished literary career, Professor Edel celebrates the joys of biography, teaching, the human imagination, and the life of dolphins.
"A specter viewed by a specter": Autobiography in Biography
Authors: McCord Phyllis Frus
Published: June 2010

Mark Harris makes explicit the hidden relationship between biographer and subject in Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck by calling attention to the process of researching and writing a biography. Boswell and Johnson are in the background as Harris draws on conventions usually associated with autobiography (its dramatized narrator and self-accounting form) to suggest the possibilities for evoking a "life" in the 20th century.
Sofya Kovalevskaya's A Russian Childhood As Poetic Autobiography
Authors: Rygiel Mary Ann
Published: June 2010

Sofya Kovalevskaya's A Russian Childhood (1889) is not, as some would have it, a conventional scientific autobiography, presumably meriting attention only because it was written by that rare phenomenon, a distinguished woman mathematician. Rather, Kovalevskaya's work should be understood and judged as what it actually is-a poetic autobiography of real literary achievement.
What's The Use?: Critical Theory and the Study of Autobiography
Authors: Jay Paul
Published: June 2010

In recent years, theoretical work on the criticism of autobiography has greatly accelerated. Some of this work has been generated by a study of autobiography itself, but much of it has come from work in contemporary critical theory. Theorists have begun to pay close attention to autobiography for the questions it raises about referentiality and about the nature of the literary subject. As a consequence, structuralist, deconstructive, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and feminist critical theories have begun to have a profound impact on the criticism of autobiographical literature.
Bibliography of Works about Life-Writing for the Latter-1980s
Authors: Wachter Phyllis E.
Published: June 2010

This year's bibliography continues the survey of dissertations, periodicals, reviews, articles, and books dealing with the many aspects of life-writing that have appeared in previous fall issues of Biography from 1985 through 1988. It includes works written from 1986 through 1989, including studies of the theory and practice of biography and autobiography, as well as reports of conferences and special issues of periodicals devoted to life-writing. Works by and about women continue to be significant, as well as oral histories and ethical issues connected with biographers' work.
Joshua Hobson and the Business of Radicalism
Authors: Cordery Simon
Published: June 2010

This article takes a biographical approach to the political history of the English working class, integrating readily-overlooked biographical information with the study of the organization of protest. By gleaning evidence from periodicals, advertisements, pamphlets, and other "ephemeral" sources, it illustrates the business practices undergirding radical agitation in the period 1833 to 1845.
Bibliography of Works about Life-Writing for the Latter-1980s
Authors: Wachter Phyllis E.
Published: June 2010

The song of ourselves that constitutes life-writing continues to incorporate previously unheard notes in the latter 1980s, including celebiographies of the rich and famous, oral autobiographies of those who are neither, and previously out-of-print diaries. The challenge for biography in the latter 1980s is giving voice to life-songs presently too unfamiliar or too radical for unreceptive minds.
Johnson's Life of Savage: Biography as Argument
Authors: Schwalm David E.
Published: June 2010

The apparently conflicting intentions in Johnson's Life of Savage can be reconciled by recognizing the Life as a rhetorical work addressed to a specific contemporary audience. This study attempts to demonstrate, with reference to Cicero's theory of the rhetorical "status" of arguments, how Johnson's strategies in the Life constitute a coherent response to particular rhetorical problems.
The Double Vision of Edwin Mullhouse (for Louis Sass)
Authors: Boyd John D.
Published: June 2010

Edwin Mullhouse , Steven Millhauser's 1972 novel, deserves broader recognition. Its genre experimentation has been noted, as has its superb evocation of childhood. This essay explores two further matters: its innovations upon the Double tradition, and its revitalizing of some Romantic ideas about the relation of childhood to adulthood.
Edward Gordon Craig: The Revolutionary of the Theatre as Hamlet
Authors: Payne Harry
Published: June 2010

Gordon Craig wished to effect a revolution in the late Victorian theatre. To justify that rejection of the world of his parents (Ellen Terry, Edwin Godwin) and mentor (Henry Irving), he developed an obsessive identification with Hamlet, seeing himself chosen by destiny to use the power of the play to cleanse the world of evils.
Gertrude Stein's Mediating Stanzas
Authors: Winston Elizabeth
Published: June 2010

In Stanzas in Meditation , written during the same period as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , Gertrude Stein adopts an abstract style to explore the consequences of her literary collaboration with Alice Toklas. Stanzas challenges the view of Stein presented in the Toklas narrative and enables readers to reconcile the self-confident Stein of that work with the troubled, reflective Stein of Everybody's Autobiography .
Congenial Associates: The Biographical Essays of William Osler
Authors: Kingsbury Mary
Published: June 2010

William Osler, first Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins and Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, published a volume of biographical essays, An Alabama Student . An examination of those essays reveals Osler's considerable skills as a biographer as well as his frequent failure to resolve the imbalance between their historical and biographical content.
The Mask of Fiction: William Dean Howells's Experiments in Autobiography
Authors: Jacobson Marcia
Published: June 2010

"The Mask of Fiction: William Dean Howells's Experiments in Autobiography" traces Howells's efforts to solve two problems inherent in autobiography: the autobiographer must infuse his past self with enough solidity to be credible and must link the past self to the present narrating self. For Howells the solution lay in fictionalizing his narrator.
Made in Birmingham: Lloyd George, Chamberlain, and the Boer War
Authors: Rintala Marvin
Published: June 2010

In illustration of the politics of conscience, David Lloyd George risked power, prestige, and wealth by opposing the Boer War. By speaking against the war in Birmingham, political home of Joseph Chamberlain—whose war it was—Lloyd George also risked his life. It was his courage in Birmingham that made Lloyd George's political career.
Unaccustomed Role: The Scientist as Historical Biographer-Two Nineteenth-Century Portrayals of Newton
Authors: Theerman Paul
Published: June 2010

Some gauge of the changing social role of the scientist in early Victorian Britain is made by looking at biographies of scientists written by scientists. Two authors of Newton biographies are contrasted: Sir David Brewster (1781-1868) and Augustus De Morgan (1806-1871). Both were connected with and wrote from the viewpoint of political Whiggism. But Brewster, concerned for the public image of the scientist, stressed Newton's genius and his high moral character. De Morgan debunked Brewster's excesses, emphasized "sagacity" over "genius," and separated intellectual accomplishment from moral qualities.
Catherine Pozzi's "Agnès": Writing as Self-Construction
Authors: Joseph Lawrence A.
Published: June 2010

Catherine Pozzi's story "Agnès" (1927) documents in fictional form its author's attempt to transcend the limitations she felt in her role as a woman. In particular, it reflects Catherine Pozzi's complex relationship with Paul Valéry and her struggle to emancipate herself from his intellectual domination.
The Annual Biography Survey: Our Contributors and Subscribers on Reviewing
Authors: Fredericks Kaye
Published: June 2010

In an attempt to come to grips with the contemporary review, the third Annual Biography survey asks readers of reviews about biography, writers of reviews of biography, and authors of biographies to respond to three questions about reviewing.
Fictional Forms in William Hale White's Autobiography of Mark Rutherford and Mark Rutherford's Deliverance
Authors: Brookes Gerry H.
Published: June 2010

William Hale White's Autobiography of Mark Rutherford and Mark Rutherford's Deliverance are usually read as self-expressive and literally autobiographical. Although they use autobiographical materials, along with much that is purposefully invented, they assume two different, ordinary forms of narrative fiction. The Autobiography is an imitation of an action; Deliverance an apologue.
Telling His Own Story: Henry James's William Wetmore Story
Authors: Jones Marnie
Published: June 2010

Henry James barely suppresses his own disinterest in the sculptor William Story in order to experiment with what he could have made of Story's experience. The result is a curious combination of biography, autobiography, and familiar Jamesian fictional interests-exiled American artists and a mesmerizing but somehow ominous Europe.
Gender In/Difference in Contemporary Hebrew Fictional Autobiographies
Authors: Feldman Yael S.
Published: June 2010

This article corroborates the "culturalist" definition of gender by exploring the divergence and convergence of male/female fictional autobiographies in Hebrew literature. It argues that while preoccupation with collective identity is shared by both genders, it is precisely this constraint that prevents women from direct presentation of their imagined selves and forces them into historical displacements.
Brother Against Brother: Roger North's Life of Dr. John North
Authors: Cochrane Hamilton E.
Published: June 2010

A neglected masterpiece in the genre of the brief portrait, Roger North's Life of Dr. John North is remarkable because it employs a unique narrative strategybased on what the subject might have accomplished had he lived longer—and illustrates the tension, present in nearly every life, arising from the conflicting aims of biographer and subject: one seeks to discover what the other has concealed.
Father, Son and Uncertain Solutions: Conversations and Reflections About National Socialist Germany
Authors: Petschauer Peter
Published: June 2010

Petschauer's article is an attempt to understand his father's service with Hitler's SS and post-World War II struggles to deal with that involvement. Dr. Erich Petschauer's efforts to come to grips with his past took the principal form of conversations with his son and spanned the mid-nineteen-seventies. The wish of his youth to be a teacher was thus finally realized in the explicit and implicit insights transmitted to a larger audience through his son.
Ludwig Richter: Professional Illustrator and Amateur Autobiographer
Authors: Fraser Catherine C.
Published: June 2010

Ludwig Richter's illustrations of popular literature are familiar to many. His autobiography, left unfinished when he died in 1884, is not as widely known nor is it altogether successful either in presenting a candid portrait or in describing Richter's artistic development. The problem lies essentially with limitations and differences between verbal and visual composition.
Abraham Wheelock, Arabist and Saxonist
Authors: Murphy Michael , Barrett Edward
Published: June 2010

A short documented biography of a seventeenth-century Cambridge scholar who was a pioneer in the study of both Anglo-Saxon and Oriental languages, who occupied the first English academic posts in both Arabic and Old English, and who published work in both Persian and Old English. The paper emphasizes Wheelock's use of both studies for polemical religious purposes.
Bibliography of Works about Life-Writing for the Mid-1980s
Authors: Wachter Phyllis E.
Published: June 2010

Biographers and their subjects in the mid-1980s are as international in scope and as varied in character as the global village within which life-writing finds its audience.
Acting Out Biographies: Jewish Leadership at a New England Prep School
Authors: Goodman Paula
Published: June 2010

The New England college preparatory school provides a microcosm of Jewish life in an academic setting. In an educational project for five new England preparatory schools students explored different forms of Jewish leadership by acting the roles of historical figures with whom they identified. Leaders ranged from business woman and mother, Gluckel of Hamlin, to Zionist Theodore Herzl and poet Hannah Senesh. These biographical presentations revealed students creating their own biographies as Jewish leaders.
Locating Loren Eiseley
Authors: Heidtmann Peter
Published: June 2010

William C. Spengemann's discussion of three basic autobiographical modes provides a framework for locating Eiseley as an autobiographer. Analysis shows that he is temperamentally unsuited for the historical mode, and that, while philosophical in his concerns, he is essentially poetic in his presentation of himself as a fugitive.
John Horne Burns (Milan, 1950): A Portrait by Indro Montanelli
Authors: Bassett Mark T.
Published: June 2010

Indro Montanelli's portrait of John Home Burns is a noteworthy commentary on Italo-American literary and sociocultural relations. At the same time, the portrait holds interest for biographers and critics of Burns, author of the best-selling World War II "novel" The Gallery (1947), because it dramatizes his behavior and philosophies during a special, brief encounter in Milan.
Resurrection of the Old Saints in the Biographical Discourse
Authors: Makolkina Anna
Published: June 2010

The essay juxtaposes Russian and English heroic biography written in the nineteenth century and contemporary anti-heroic biographical attempts. Biographies of William Gladstone, the English statesman and political leader, and Alexander Pushkin, the Russian national poet, permit analysis not only of the vicissitudes of the genre, but also the external factors affecting its development.
On the Artist's Biography in Sung China: The Case of Li Ch'eng
Authors: Lachman Charles
Published: June 2010

Works of art can only be fully understood when viewed in light of the artist's "total environment," the reconstruction of which is often largely dependent upon biographical documents. An analysis of three early biographies of the Chinese landscape master Li Ch'eng (919-967), however, reveals the ways in which such accounts themselves may be influenced by a given author's "image of the artist."
Clara Malraux's Le Bruit de nos pas : Biography and the Question of Women in the "Case of Malraux"
Authors: Goessl Alfred F. , Champagne Roland A.
Published: June 2010

Clara Malraux's Memoirs give us reason to re-introduce history into the myth of André Malraux in order to distinguish myth from man. "The Case of Malraux" was a mythological construct of André Malraux as the ideal "new man" of the 1930's. Malraux's own biography needs to be qualified and clarified as a result of Clara's published memoirs. In fact, Clara's relationship to André allows us to distinguish the man André from the legend of Malraux. Through corroboration and/or modification from other contemporaries of the Malraux's, Clara's Memoirs assist us in understanding the role of women in André's life and what those women tell us about André the man.
The Paranoid Political Actor
Authors: Robins Robert S. , Post Jerrold M.
Published: June 2010

The psychodynamics and clinical phenomenology of the paranoid position are related to the phenomenon of the paranoid political actor. The paranoid political actor's interaction with the environment has characteristics of a self-fulfilling prophecy, for his defensive aggression ultimately creates a genuinely hostile environment which he at first only delusively fears. While the flagrant paranoid is usually recognized as ill, the unrecognized paranoid can be highly effective as a leader. The degree and scope of his effectiveness depends on his political skill and the receptiveness of the polity. When the frame of reference is transcendent, and the skilled paranoid political actor finds a receptive polity, the destructive charismatic leader-follower relationship ensues.
The Apotheosis of Huey Long
Authors: Jeansonne Glen
Published: June 2010

The largely favorable depiction of Huey P. Long established principally by the late Professor T. Harry Williams and other Long biographers is questionable. Long did less than he claimed, others did more, and what he did was not lasting and institutional but ephemeral and opportunistic.
Woman in the Twentieth Century: Margaret Fuller and Feminist Biography
Authors: Keyser Elizabeth Lennox
Published: June 2010

Feminist biographical theory emphasizes the importance of ordinary women's lives, the "domestic density" of extraordinary women's lives, and, perhaps most important, the reciprocal relationship between a biographer and her subject-a relationship that has been compared with friendship and even mother-hood. Four recent biographies of nineteenth-century feminist Margaret Fuller-two written for adults and two for young people-exemplify the problems that feminist theory can help resolve and the insights to which it can lead.
Typological Autobiography in Seventeenth-Century England
Authors: Pearlman E.
Published: June 2010

In seventeenth-century England, some writers treated their own lives as though they were neotypes of biblical figures. Arise Evans, Francis Bampfield, and Lodowick Muggleton all wrote autobiographies in which recourse to typological thinking helps to resolve psychological difficulties. Both Evans and Bampfield develop a private theological system; Muggleton actually becomes the founder of a new religion.
Strategic Irony and Lytton Strachey's Contribution to Biography
Authors: Hutch Richard A.
Published: June 2010

Lytton Strachey's use of strategic irony opened the door to post-World War II interest in possible connections between psychology and biography. Recent discussions in psychology and literary criticism serve as background for demonstrating the dynamic of strategic irony in Strachey's life and work, and for suggesting that his accomplishment is a powerful personal legacy available to today's working biographer.
Filial Memoirs of Tolstoy
Authors: Meyers Jeffrey
Published: June 2010

Tolstoy fathered thirteen children between 1863 and 1888, of whom three died in infancy and two in childhood. Five of the eight surviving children wrote memoirs, which were published between 1914 and 1975. These seven firsthand accounts provide a portrait of his patriarchal life and contribute to our understanding of the social history of nineteenth-century Russia.
Orwell and Biography
Authors: Crick Bernard
Published: June 2010

The biographer's goal is the full truth about his subject, not moral edification, entertainment, or character study. Discovering the truth about Orwell was particularly difficult for three reasons: he was secretive about his private life, he was well-known by others only relatively late in his literary career, and much of his best writing blends fact with fiction.
Personality, Pathology, and The Act of Creation: The Case of Alfred Hitchcock
Authors: Peele Stanton
Published: June 2010

Recent biographies of Alfred Hitchcock—especially Spoto's (1983)—have emphasized the deterministic role of Hitchcock's emotional problems in his art. Such analyses of Hitchcock's personality and creativity touch on classic issues of the relationship between art and artist. However, any reduction of artistic themes like those in Hitchcock's films into terms of personal psychopathology is inadequate for apprehending artistic creation.
Of Sonia's Doli, Grandfather's Fiddle, and the Changeling: The Fantasy Childhood of Leopold Stokowski
Authors: Smith William A.
Published: June 2010

For two generations critics of conductor Leopold Stokowski commented on his strange accent, inconsistent accounts of his origins, birth date and childhood. Hostile and influential critics averse to Stokowski's music making and to his life style created a Stokowski stereotype based largely on these inconsistencies in which the conductor was summed up as "charlatan, poseur and phony." However the accent, romanticised childhood and family were so implausible and easy to expose that the motive behind their creation could not be charlatanry-if only because these transparent fabrications gave Stokowski's critics their most potent weapon against him. What then was his motive? It lay in his intense aversion to his real background and his creation of a "family romance" as an alternative, in accord with his adult conception of his own identity. Stokowski's fabrications, believed in the telling, protected him from the guilt and shame associated with his real London childhood.
Gyp and the Reconstruction of (Self-)Consciousness
Authors: Millstone Amy
Published: June 2010

In the opening chapter of her memoirs, the best-selling French novelist Gyp (1849-1932) describes her childhood experience of language acquisition. Equating speech with consciousness as well as self-consciousness, the author uses three distinct narrative voices to trace her awareness of the importance of language as the key to reality.
Biographical Blindspots: The Case of the Cousins Alger
Authors: Scharnhorst Gary
Published: June 2010

Biographical blindspots exist insofar as original sources about the lives of significant historical figures do not exist. A minor figure who retires long before death (e.g., W. R. Alger) or who becomes the subject of intense public interest only long after death (e.g., Horatio Alger, Jr.) may be lost entirely in such a blindspot.
Reunion and Reinterpretation: Group Biography in Process
Authors: Bloom Lynn Z.
Published: June 2010

This paper analyzes a process by which a group informally collaborates in the creation of its own biography through influencing the autobiographical recollections of its members. It shows how the post-World War II reunions of the civilian internees of the Japanese camp in Baguio, Philippines function as family reunions do in creating, interpreting, and transmitting the group's collective biography.
Emotional History: An Exploratory Essay
Authors: Raffel Burton
Published: June 2010

It is argued that reconstruction of the emotional lives of historical figures is a separate historical genre. Comparative analysis of historical genres, and illustrations of emotional history, constitute the bulk of the essay.
Cabrera Infante as Biographer
Authors: Hall Kenneth E.
Published: June 2010

Guillermo Cabrera Infante has not been closely studied for his stylistically interesting biographical work. Cabrera Infante pays homage to some prominent biographers. He has written many capsule biographies, both comic and serious. References to many figures, especially Fidel Castro, appear also within larger works, including Mea Cuba (1992).
This is the Story I Heard: A Conversation With Maxine Hong Kingston and Earll Kingston
Authors: Thompson Phyllis Hoge
Published: June 2010

Maxine Hong Kingston examines the great variety of motives and viewpoints which comprise the "true" version of a life. In talking about the sources of her own narratives, she differentiates among fiction, non-fiction, and biography, and notes how a characteristic slant of memory can color a narrator's story and draw forward private over public major events.
The Language of Portraiture
Authors: Le Guin Charles A.
Published: June 2010

This article examines the emergence of a common language for biography and portrait painting among writers and artists and their critics. Drawing heavily on artistic terminology, the language of portraiture expresses the correspondence between the goals of painters and biographers, and the common problems they have in realizing their aims.
Paul Lafargue and the Beginnings of Marxism in France
Authors: Derfler Leslie
Published: June 2010

Paul Lafargue (1842-1911), the son-in-law and disciple of Karl Marx, helped to found the first French collectivist party. His role is described in some detail as is his position of superiority in the socialist movement, thanks to his close ties to Marx and Engels. However, it was this same sense of superiority that contributed to the reductionism and sectarianism that came to characterize the French Marxist parties.
Edith Wharton's "Tact of Omission": Harmony and Proportion in A Backward Glance
Authors: Fryer Judith
Published: June 2010

In this article Judith Fryer examines the widely-held belief—posited by Edith Wharton herself—that there were two Whartons, one who "makes up," or embellishes herself for a social audience, and one who "makes up" stories. The one is motivated by the sort of order set forth in Wharton's Decoration of Houses ; the other is attracted to the disorder of Wharton's ghost stories. Fryer not only demonstrates the interrelationships between these "selves," but shows how in A Backward Glance Wharton recreates herself as her own fictional heroine.
The Biographer's Transference: A Chapter in Psychobiographical Epistemology
Authors: Schepeler Eva
Published: June 2010

The biographer's emotional relationship to the subject is often referred to as "transference." The history of this and related concepts is discussed in the context of and in its applicability to psychobiography. Suggestions are made as to how biographers can avoid, recognize, and actively deal with transference, and how readers can estimate the extent and direction of the author's transferential bias.
Authorial Typology in Literary Biography
Authors: Snipes Wilson
Published: June 2010

Biographers of literary subjects adopt stances to suit their aims, priorities, assumptions, backgrounds, forms, methodologies, techniques, audiences. A typology based on the personas adopted would include the biographer as chronicler, historian, narrator, critic, psychologist, artist, and fictionist.
Maud Gonne: "Strange Harmonies Amid Discord"
Authors: Pratt Linda Ray
Published: June 2010

The nature of Maud Gonne's personality and historical significance is difficult to assess because of Yeats's poetic myth, Irish romanticism, and Gonne's efforts to create a legend for herself. Recent biographical study indicates some measure of her accomplishments, the centrality of Yeats to her life, and the damage to her credibility from feminine stereotypes.
Transference: The Biographer's Dilemma
Authors: Edel Leon
Published: June 2010

Freud's discussion of the pitfalls of "transference"—that is, the biographer's personal involvement in the life of the subject—has received too little attention from biographers who continue to romanticize and fictionalize the lives they write in response to unconscious inner fantasies. The problem is illustrated by Maurois' discussion of his emotions while writing his romantic lives of Shelley and Disraeli. Other illustrations are given. Transference may be regarded as the core problem in all biographical writing.
Combative Spirituality and the Life of Benjamin E. Mays
Authors: Preskill Stephen
Published: June 2010

Using Cornel West's concept of combative spirituality, the author recounts incidents from the life of educator and civil rights activist Benjamin E. Mays. Emboldened by the support and confidence he derived from his family and community, Mays devoted his life to challenging racism wherever he encountered it. As president of Morehouse College, Mays influenced many civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., and helped to establish the climate for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The essay concludes with the suggestion that the leadership exerted by Mays is the type needed today to address our most pressing social problems.
Threads of Identity in Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior
Authors: Miller Margaret
Published: June 2010

As a Chinese-American female, Maxine Hong Kingston has problems of identity which profoundly affect the autobiographical act. Her difficulties with the autobiographical "I" stem from the Chinese submergence of individual identity and its devaluation of the female; her bios is, similarly, less a description of her own life than of the ancestral forces which have shaped her. In the act of writing, however, Kingston rescues herself from her victimization and creates both a self and a text which transcend the tangle of influences.
Watergate Endings and Initiations
Authors: Dewsnap Terence
Published: June 2010

Traditional autobiographical endings serve as "touchstones" for evaluating a group of Watergate autobiographies whose endings demonstrate a persistent confusion of tone and value. The language of moral reclamation in the Watergate endings constructs a psychological melodrama in which the protagonist is more victim than master of irony.
Story and Design in Book Eight of Augustine's Confessions
Authors: Johnson Donovan
Published: June 2010

Augustine applies rhetorical principles of On Christian Doctrine to Book Eight of the Confessions by synthesizing four conversion stories as reenactments of the gospel paradigm. This pattern invites readers to repeat that reenactment. Thus Augustine's rhetorical design rather than a self-analysis or compulsion to confess informs the Confessions as autobiography.
What Makes Autobiography Interrogative?
Authors: Perreault Donna
Published: June 2010

The language of questions used so often in autobiographical narratives and theory may reflect the interrogative nature of autobiography. Engendering, directing, and sustaining the narrative inquiry, an autobiographer's questions are at the heart of his enterprise. While they begin by impelling his narrative, they frequently end by characterizing it: its brand of truth, its inconclusiveness, its self-referentiality, its expression of the speaker's will to know. Richard Wright's Black Boy exemplifies how autobiography can thus be seen as a narrative correlative to the interrogative.
The Orange Race: George S. Patton, Jr.'s Japanese-American Hostage Plan
Authors: Slackman Michael
Published: June 2010

George S. Patton, Jr., best known as an aggressive tank commander, was chief of U.S. Army intelligence in Hawaii before World War II. Doubting the loyalty of Japanese-Americans, he planned to make hostages of 128 leaders of Hawaii's Japanese community to forestall fifth column activity in the event of war. This article examines Patton's plan as well as the psychological and historical context in which it was conceived. The document, recently released by the National Archives, is appended.
Digging Up Gandhi's Psychological Roots
Authors: Hay Stephen
Published: June 2010

Based on scattered sources relating to his first eighteen years, suggests that three character traits central in his adult years had their roots in his early interactions with his parents and playmates, viz., his devotion to serving those in difficulty, his skill as a mediator, and his readiness to refuse to obey a law or command repugnant to his conscience.
Federico Fellini: Artist in Search of Self
Authors: Conti Isabella , McCormack William A.
Published: June 2010

Cited as one of the greatest films of all time, 8 1/2 represents an advance in biography. The film deals with problems of adult development which stifle personal and professional growth. Using Jungian theory, Fellini provides a memorable and revealing glimpse into the hidden side of personality and the psychodynamics of creativity.
Mark Twain : God's Fool Redux
Authors: Skandera-Trombley Laura
Published: June 2010

This article is derived from a roundtable discussion organized by the author to celebrate the twenty-first anniversary of Hamlin Hill's Mark Twain: God's Fool In addition to recognizing Hill's work in biography, the time seemed right to access the plethora of new scholarship on Twain and to discuss biography as a genre and how this affects Twain studies.
A Current Bibliography on Life-Writing
Authors: Bennett Kathleen A.
Published: June 2010

Garnered from sources of journal and publisher's lists, this annotated bibliography includes books and articles about biography, autobiography, and related aspects of life-writing in British and American publications during 1982-1983. The survey indicates a decline in writings about the theoretical foundations of biography and autobiography but increasing interest in minority biography.
Self-fulfilling Visions in The Woman Warrior and Thousand Pieces of Gold
Authors: Cheung King-Kok
Published: June 2010

Imaginative vision informs Kingston's autobiography and McCunn's biographical novel, transforming Chinese fantasy into American possibility. Kingston's protagonist learns to fight by seeking inspiration from a legendary woman warrior; McCunn's protagonist maintains her self-esteem by seeking reassurance from the Chinese metaphor for daughter. Although the actual status of daughters belies both the legendary and metaphorical projections, the heroines eventually develop identities which answer to their original fantasies.
No More Farewells: An Interview with Jeanne and John Houston
Authors: Friedson Anthony
Published: June 2010

Jeanne and James Houston discuss with Tony Friedson the genesis of Farewell to Manzanar —their account of Jeanne's adolescence under internment; the personal and political implications of that internment; their autobiographical methods; and the work which grew from this their best-known collaboration.
Comparative Political Biography: Jayaprakash Narayan and Thomas Jefferson
Authors: Summy Ralph
Published: June 2010

Despite living in eras 200 years apart and coming from radically different cultures, the biographies of political leaders Jayaprakash Narayan and Thomas Jefferson bear a marked resemblance. Not only did these men have many personal traits in common, but their careers tended to follow similar patterns. More importantly, they were in agreement on virtually every crucial aspect of their political thinking. As embodiments of world revolutionary ideals, they have jointly given succeeding generations the inspiration and guidelines to draw upon when tackling the problems of a new age.
Power and the Self in Henry Adams's Art of Biography
Authors: Hughson Lois
Published: June 2010

Henry Adams's The Life of Albert Gallatin and John Randolph show early in his career his ambivalence about personal power and its relation to accomplishment. Gallatin and Randolph represent not only different political principles but also contrasting views of power. Gallatin's scientific mind makes possible his transcendence of politics to "practical statesmanship." Randolph's political nature leads him towards aggrandizement and political "terror." These biographies move not so much toward the revelation of character through action as toward a view of the self as larger than character and shaped by the response character permits it to make to circumstance. Gallatin's stature depends on his response to the loss of power, a response by which he is able to identify with the issue of events and to surrender any goals conflicting with that issue, thus exchanging personal power for historical significance.
Bibliography of Works About Life-Writing
Authors: Wachter Phyllis E.
Published: June 2010

A selected bibliography of recent works about life-writing (twelfth in the series that began with Biography 8.4, Fall 1985).
The Psychoaesthetics of Autobiography
Authors: Arana R. Victoria
Published: June 2010

To see an autobiography as art, we must make sense of the author's feelings about his life. But interpretation of the lives of others is massively subject to projective distortion, for reasons as various as readers themselves. This paper outlines an aesthetics capable of minimizing a reader's tendency to distort the intentionally artistic shape of the autobiographies he addresses. Psychoanalytic technique (not psychoanalytic theory ) can come to the rescue of aesthetics, where life materials are the subject of concern.
The Different Voice of Canadian Feminist Autobiographers
Authors: Buss Helen M.
Published: June 2010

The theory that women exhibit a different ethical development than men, one in which "identity and intimacy are . . . conjoined" (Gilligan 13), is used to interrogate the autobiographies of three Canadian feminists, women who would seem to have pursued a development that emphasized individual achievement rather than relationship. Such women not only seek to "balance" the two identity formation processes, but also exhibit the stylistic markers of several autobiographical formats in seeking "balance."
Recognizing the Life-Text: Towards a Poetics of Biography
Authors: Epstein William H.
Published: June 2010

By exploring contemporary generic relationships between the 'natural,' the 'cultural,' and the 'narratable' as an already inscribed narrative scheme (a generic frame ), we can project an approach to the poetics of biography. This generic frame employs these relationships as an elusive attempt to "recognize the life-text" as the moment of cultural transformation when a natural life become a narratable text, when a narrated event becomes a biographical fact.