bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Making Herself Born: Ghost Writing and Willa Cather's Developing Autobiography
Authors: Zitter Emmy Stark
Published: June 2010

Although she ghostwrote an autobiography of S. S. McClure early in her career, Willa Cather sublimated her own biographical impulse into her works of fiction. By applying Susan Stanford Friedman's paradigm for female self-writing to Cather's life and works, we can help explain contradictions and ironies in Cather's biographical/autobiographical stance and illuminate, as well, readings of the most biographical of Cather's novels.
Masculine Interpretation of Queen Anne, Wife of James I
Authors: Bergeron David M.
Published: June 2010

For the past one hundred years historians have dismissed Queen Anne, wife of James I, as impulsive, frivolous, and insignificant. This interpretation reflects a masculine-based ideology that has recently been challenged by a feminist-oriented reevaluation of Anne as a politically skilled opponent of Jacobean patriarchy. This more balanced view is supported by references to Anne from the early seventeenth century.
Revising Lives: Bernard Shaw and His Biographer
Authors: Wadsworth Sarah
Published: June 2010

Shaw's galley revisions of Archibald Henderson's 1932 biography, Bernard Shaw: Playboy and Prophet , reveal a unique collaboration between biographer and subject. The result is a subversion of biographical conventions, in which the assumed voice of the biographer lends credence and authority to the disguised voice of the subject.
Trollope to His Readers: The Unreliable Narrator of An Autobiography
Authors: Allen Peter
Published: June 2010

Considered as a work specifically addressed to the circle of his readers, An Autobiography reveals the complexity of Trollope's artistic self-awareness and his wilful courting of misunderstanding as a protest against simplistic interpretation, as an invitation to look again, to read both his character and his works more carefully.
A Select Bibliography of South African Autobiography
Authors: Westley David
Published: June 2010

This bibliography presents annotated entries that cover a variety of autobiographies written thus far in South Africa. Though it covers material from the Boer War to the present, it emphasizes recent works describing the struggle for freedom in South Africa with special emphasis on labor movements.
Annual Bibliography of Works about Lifewriting, 1997-1998
Authors: Wachter Phyllis E.
Published: June 2010

This year's annotated list of books, collections, special issues and annuals, articles and essays, and dissertations about lifewriting covers the period from 1997 to August 1998.
Biography about Children for Children
Authors: Jordan Polly Carver
Published: June 2010

Because today's children will be tomorrow's leaders, the writing of biographies especially for them is both a challenging and rewarding effort. There is the opportunity for influencing their young, impressionable minds by presenting the lives of heroes and heroines of an earlier period. In-depth, accurate research is vital, and material must be presented in such a way that the young reader will be drawn to identify with the subject of the biography.
Law, Legislation and Literature: The Life of Grace H. Harte
Authors: Doyle James
Published: June 2010

Lawyer and law journalist Grace H. Harte (1867-1957) presents a challenge in the research and writing of a minor life. Her story involves the American literary milieu of the 1890s and the twentieth-century struggle of women to practice law in the United States. The source materials include journalism and biographical fiction, but only a few letters. By careful inference, however, the biographer can develop an appropriate tribute to the subject's character and achievements.
Authorial Authority: Johnson's Life of Savage and Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol
Authors: Bush Jamie
Published: June 2010

Authorial biographies—biographies written by authors—as exemplified by Johnson's Life of Savage and Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol , constitute a distinctive subgenre of biography, remarkable for, among other features, a relative unconcern with facts, ideological independence, antipanegyrical orientation, and a tendency toward self-assertion and self-investment. This article compares the strategies by which Johnson and Nabokov constitute themselves as authors while operating within the biographical form.
A Marginal "I": The Autobiographical Self Deconstructed in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior
Authors: Melchior Bonnie
Published: June 2010

Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiography The Woman Warrior deconstructs the genre of autobiography and, in doing so, associated American ideologies. Disenfranchised by gender and by cultural displacement, the author finds an identity by fictionalizing herself. Comparing her approach to Richard Rodriguez' in Hunger of Memory (which addresses similar concerns and which also focusses on language) illuminates how Kingston deconstructs the genre.
Ghosting an Autobiography
Authors: Strickland Margot
Published: June 2010

The celebrity autobiography is a well-established literary genre into which an unsuspecting biographer may be lured by a subject eager for the resultant publicity and a publisher keen to make a quick profit from a popular book. The author details the subtle differences between straight biography and a "ghosted" book.
What Should Biographers Tell?: The Ethics of Telling Lives
Authors: Manis Jerome G.
Published: June 2010

Popular biographies often are based on rumor, gossip, and falsehoods. Publishers pay millions of dollars to their authors. In the absence of any code of ethics for biographers, the lure of wealth and fame is apt to attract increasing numbers of writers. Formulating and promulgating the ethical standards of biographical publications are needed to protect their future quality.
Claiming Personas and Rejecting Other-Imposed Identities: Self-Writing as Self-Righting in the Autobiographies of Richard Rodriguez
Authors: Fine Laura
Published: June 2010

This article concerns Rodriguez's attempt to shape his own identities in defiance of the identities his family and his critics have tried to impose on him. His texts witness a tension between self-revelation and self-masking more complex than his critics have given him credit for.
Political Intrigue and Family Conflict During the Civil War: The Beechers of Elmira
Authors: Glenn Myra C.
Published: June 2010

In 1862 Thomas K. Beecher, chaplain of the 141st New York Regiment, accused his commanding officer of treason. This accusation earned him the enmity of his fellow officers, and caused his younger brother James, a lieutenant colonel in the regiment, to attempt suicide and later leave the 141st. In exploring these events, this article illuminates the sibling tensions in the Beecher family, and offers a case study of the intrigue that roiled many regiments during the Civil War.
On Degendering English
Authors: DeFrancis John
Published: June 2010

This article recounts how the author came to be involved in the problem of degendering the English language, summarizes the rationale for doing so, presents a few specific examples of degendering, and notes how writers can find help for their own efforts to use non-sexist language.
Biography and Buddhism in Thailand (Presented at the University of Hawaii, April 30, 1993)
Authors: Sivaraksa Sulak
Published: June 2010

Sulak Sivaraksa's discussion of biography in Thailand, in a seminar at the University of Hawaii, contrasts traditional and modern styles of life-writing, and problems associated with both. He points out a unique view on the subject of truth in biography.
Bibliography of Works about Life-Writing Which Links the Decades
Authors: Wachter Phyllis E.
Published: June 2010

If we are to believe, as Emily Dickinson tells us, that we are often harder on ourselves than others could ever be, then Hawthorne in his condemnatory fictionalized portrait of Margaret Fuller in The Blithedale Romance or the modern day "celebiographer" of the rich and famous must surely have a strict standard for their own behavior given the severity with which they judge the social and personal mores of their contemporaries. Yet whether it be the reminiscence of a senior citizen or the scholarship of a feminist writer, the works in this year's bibliography reflect that the "truth" is as subjective as the perceiver of it.
Contemporary Japanese Biography: An Interview with Shoichi Saeki
Authors: Friedson Tony
Published: June 2010

In this interview with Anthony Friedson, Shoichi Saeki discusses life-writing in both Asia and Japan, old and new directions in Japanese biography, Confucian thought, the continuance of hagiographie approaches to the imperial family, women writers, reciprocal relations with Western biography, classical and modern interaction, some possible future developments, and his forthcoming book on the history of Japanese biography, a first.
Fargobawlers: James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford
Authors: Wiesenfarth Joseph
Published: June 2010

Ford Madox Ford and James Joyce worked to make way for what was new in literature. They were fargobawlers, clearers of the way, promoting their own work as well as that of others. Both the events of their lives and the intertextuality of their fiction demonstrate a closer and friendlier relationship between them than has formerly been realized.
Theodore Dreiser and the Anti-Progressive Drive
Authors: Filler Louis
Published: June 2010

Theodore Dreiser appears, when noticed, as author of classic novels, Sister Carrie being most often cited as surviving publishers' abuse. Dreiser himself is perceived as a pioneer: awkward in prose, but honest in reporting his own and American life. Evidence in his papers and elsewhere reveals a secret life opposed to the Progressivism of his time, and requiring revaluation in light of changes in society and cultural standards.
Charles Fenner: Scientist Who Would Be An Administrator
Authors: Hyams Bernard
Published: June 2010

The career of Dr. Charles Fenner in Australia tells us much about the recent history of education and educational administration in that country. The struggles undertaken by this gentle scholar to advance the cause of technical education emphasize two of the dominant characteristics of Australian public education: resistance to vocational training and the tradition of recruitment of administrators by progression from the rank and file of teachers.
Personality, Biography, and Psychobiography
Authors: Jeansonne Glen
Published: June 2010

This essay, originally delivered at the 1988 International Psychohistory Association convention, explains how one biographer became interested in biography and why he selected his subjects to study. Using as examples his biographies of Leander H. Perez and Gerald L. K. Smith, the author discusses his methodology and insights derived from the practice of writing biography and from teaching a graduate course on the writing of biography. The essay discusses use of psychobiography techniques to examine the beliefs of American racists and anti-Semites.
Explorations of a "Sorry Genre": Andrew Field's Biographies of Vladimir Nabokov
Authors: Leach Laurie F.
Published: June 2010

Andrew Field once called biography a "sorry genre," yet he later praised its "unexplored potential." Field's exploration of the genre includes three books on Vladimir Nabokov, each of which implies a different perspective on the nature, use, and worth of literary biography and dramatizes Field's shifting relationship to his biographical subject.
"The Biography of the Century": Another Look at Richard Ellmann's James Joyce
Authors: Kooistra Lorraine Janzen
Published: June 2010

How modern and complete is "the greatest literary biography of the century"? This re-evaluation of Richard Ellmann's James Joyce focuses on the way in which Ellmann's commitment to objective presentation of historical fact impinges on his ability to create the inner man. An examination of Ellmann's evident hostility to psychoanalytic interpretation in life-writing, and an exploration of the effect this bias has on the form and style of the biography, suggest the following hypothesis: Ellmann's objectivity may be marred by too close an identification with Joyce, so that James Joyce may be a biography suffering from a "transference" relationship between the biographer and his subject.
Archives and Biographical Research: An Introduction
Authors: Cartwright James F.
Published: June 2010

Archives refers both to the historical records of an organization and to the repository where the records are kept. Two principles-provenance and original order-differentiate archives from libraries. Advanced preparation increases the quality of research one can do in an archives. The University of Hawaii, Manoa, Archives may become a significant repository for Pacific biography.
Taking the Pledge: H. H. Asquith and Drink
Authors: Rintala Marvin
Published: June 2010

The personal causes, and political consequences, of addiction to alcohol by H. H. Asquith are explored. The most important personal cause was his unhappy second marriage, to Margot Tennant. The most important political consequences were to the hopes of British temperance advocates, to effective British policymaking in the Great War, and to Asquith's own political career.
E. M. Forster: Clapham's Child
Authors: Lago Mary
Published: June 2010

Forster's attitude toward money, its benevolent possibilities and its dangers, was influenced by the evangelical faith and practice of his Thornton ancestors, members of the "Clapham Sect." This paper compares his attitude with those of Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, and examines his uses of his income and his efforts to mediate between fascination with and distrust of money's personal and social influences.
Mrs. Wickham's "Dogs of Noted Americans"
Authors: Torsney Cheryl B.
Published: June 2010

Gertrude Van Rensselaer Wickham's preliminary research for "Dogs of Noted Americans" offers insight into the domestic lives of writers, historical figures, and other celebrities of the last half of the nineteenth century as well as into the ideology of pets in Victorian America.
Encounters with James B. Conant-Harvard President and Defender of the Public School
Authors: Husén Torsten
Published: June 2010

James B. Conant's significance as an educator included establishing a graduate school of education at Harvard, reforming postwar German education as American High Commissioner, and leading a major study of American high school and teacher training, The American High School Today . The author recalls his association with Conant in relation to that report and their work together in the 1960s on the Governing Board of the Max Planck Institute for Educational Research in Berlin.
The Oral Biography
Authors: Dunaway David King
Published: June 2010

In recent decades the oral biography (a narrative of a life researched primarily through interviews) has found increasing popularity among the reading public and among researchers in disciplines ranging from anthropology to sociology. This essay offers a typology of the genre and an exploration of the subtle ways in which oral sources shape life-writing.
Mother, Make Me: Innocence Re-envisioned in Thomas Merton's The Sign of Jonas
Authors: Rukstelis Michael
Published: June 2010

An examination of Thomas Merton's use of figurai language in The Sign of Jonas will suggest how this contemporary monk began to radically alter some of the psychological preoccupations peculiar to him. This essay will suggest that his early experience with women influenced the development of the later monastic ethos.
The Masks of Loren Eiseley
Authors: Christianson Gale E.
Published: June 2010

Discontented with his personal history, the essayist and nature writer Loren Corey Eiseley invented his own which, however fictitious, enabled him to operate in the real world. Skillful projections of the self, almost all of the autobiographical writing constitutes a series of masks. While most nonfiction writers do their best to conceal their troubles, Eiseley made books out of his. Pain, beautifully rendered pain, became his leitmotif, the narrative shrouded in that ineffable melancholy the Spanish call triste
The Mnemonics of Autobiography: Lyn Hejinian's My Life
Authors: Clark Hilary
Published: June 2010

"The Mnemonics of Autobiography" shows how, in My Life , Lyn Hejinian challenges chronological assumptions of conventional autobiography, employing mnemonic techniques to emphasize the synchronous nature of memory and the writerly quality of any Life . Hejinian implies that women's life-writing must scrutinize and subvert paternalistic discourse; it must include and celebrate the repetitions and the density of lived experience.
Politics and Autobiography: Political Memoir as Polygenre
Authors: Egerton George
Published: June 2010

The paper reviews the historical development of political memoir as a distinct if polymorphous genre of popular autobiographical, political, and historical literature. The focus is on its form and functions in the period since the 18th century, at which time political memoir differentiated from historiography proper.
Empowerment Through Mythological Imaginings in Woman Warrior
Authors: Johnston Sue Ann
Published: June 2010

In Woman Warrior , Maxine Hong Kingston turns her status as marginal Other to personal and artistic advantage. Paradoxically, at the same time she criticizes the misogyny of Chinese tradition, she also shows its habit of poetic seeing, epitomized by the talk story, to be affirming of the feminine in a way that Western culture, with its rational, pragmatic underpinnings, is not.
The Curse of Performance: Inscripting the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi into the Life of Charles Dickens
Authors: Woods Leigh
Published: June 2010

Written frankly for money, Charles Dickens' biography of the English stage-clown, Joseph Grimaldi, has generally been dismissed as hackwork. Dickens's Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi , though, discloses persistent Victorian attitudes toward performers and performing, and anticipates in uncanny ways the biographical commentary that surrounds Dickens's own career as a performer.
Figura, Persona, Dynamis: Autobiography and Change
Authors: Barros Carolyn A.
Published: June 2010

As a "text" of a "life," autobiography is about change, presenting the "before" and "after" of individuals who have undergone transformations of some kind. Traditional approaches to the genre have focused on other aspects and have favored or ignored one or another of autobiography's essential elements in serving their critical purposes. This approach attempts to be comprehensive in that it deals both with how autobiography constitutes its meaning and what this constitution contributes to the discourse. It examines the rhetoric of autobiography to discover the subject (persona), ground (figura), and motive (dynamis) of the transformation.
Frank Loesser's Hidden Class
Authors: Konas Gary
Published: June 2010

Popular songwriter Frank Loesser (1910-69) portrayed himself as an intelligent lowbrow. He had, however, a complex love-hate attitude toward classical music. His family background reveals the source of a negative identity that helped form this attitude, which influenced both his personal life and the Broadway musicals he wrote.
Education and Biography in the Contemporary United States: An Introduction
Authors: Beauchamp Edward
Published: June 2010

Assays the status of educational biography today and in the recent past and concludes that people should read educational biography for the same reasons they read other kinds of biography-both to understand individual human lives and to appreciate those lives as vehicles with which to understand the larger society in which they were lived.
Bibliography of Works about Life-Writing for a Post-1980s Readership
Authors: Wachter Phyllis E.
Published: June 2010

This year's bibliographic entries reflect life-writings from many eras, regions, nations, and ethnic groupings. These examine various sociohistorical distinctions which aid in the formation of cultural difference and individual uniqueness. There is particular emphasis on civilizations utilizing oral sources and the problems scholars encounter "reading" non-Western and/or pre-literate life-studies composed by members of Black slave, Native American, and Asian communities.
George Moore's Parnell and his Island: Autobiography and the Discourse of Repudiation
Authors: Grubgeld Elizabeth
Published: June 2010

Read as Moore's first autobiography, Parnell and his Island delineates the subject self by electing not to represent it, initiating a repudiation of all inherited forms of life described within the text. In so doing, it points toward Moore's lifelong ambivalence between determinist and autogenic explanations for personal and public history.
Reembodying the Self: Representations of Rape in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Authors: Vermillion Mary
Published: June 2010

Jacobs, recording her former master's threat to rape her, and Angelou, portraying the rape she suffered at age eight, negotiate the challenge of reaffirming their sexual autonomy without reinforcing racist stereotypes that associate the black woman with illicit sexuality.
Biography and the Objective Fallacy: Pater's Experiment in "A Prince of Court Painters"
Authors: Candido Anne Marie
Published: June 2010

In his portrait of Watteau, Pater explores the complex human sympathetic and empathic perspectives that are almost inevitably behind most biographical facts, as well as a part of the biographer's own psychological relationship with his subject. Pater's portrait strongly suggests that objective portrayal is both futile and undesirable; artistic integrity and faithfulness to his vision of the subject, rather, should be the biographer's principal aim.
Narrative and Judgment in the Life of Savage
Authors: Basney Lionel
Published: June 2010

The complexity of Johnson's work is normally explained as the result of tension between "facts" and Johnson's inclination to palliate or moralize them. But the facts of this biography-and of biography in general, as Johnson understood it-are often matters of moral judgment, which, by explaining why actions were committed, makes the biography seem a probable account of the life. Like the law, biographical judgment constitutes the narrative record.
Perfecting Childhood: Horace Mann and the Origins of Public Education in the United States
Authors: Finkelstein Barbara
Published: June 2010

Linking life experiences and social changes, this essay focuses on Horace Mann's early educational experiences in New England as the source of a vision of public education so persuasive as to form the intellectual and moral scaffolding on which public education would be built and the lives of the young irreversibly altered.
Drawing Conclusions: Beardsley and Biography
Authors: Zatlin Linda Gertner
Published: June 2010

The life of Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), as described by his four biographers, leaves unanswered some tantalizing questions about his theory of art as well as his relationships with late Victorian artists and writers. As material comes up at auction, it affords an opportunity to tease out some answers. While providing no striking answers, a recently sold cache of photographs, drawings, and two letters—one previously unpublished in full—adds to our knowledge and corrects some faulty information.
Democracy : Henry Adams and the Role of Political Leader
Authors: Gilley B. H.
Published: June 2010

In Democracy Henry Adams depicted how a post-Civil War political leader succumbed to the pressures of emerging impersonal society. Adams also described the subtle appeal of political power and how it could undermine even well-intentioned persons. Adams's descriptions contain biographical overtones and foreshadow the complexities that inhibit modern political leaders.
Symbolic Leadership: An Interactive Analysis of Caribbean Political Autobiographies
Authors: Angrosino Michael V.
Published: June 2010

This paper examines the autobiographies of three Caribbean leaders to illustrate the thesis that leadership is a process of dialogic encounter between a leader and his followers. The formal construction of an autobiography is viewed as a symbolic act by which a politician stablishes his worthiness to govern by allowing him to assert that his personal aspirations have come to embody the national aspirations.
"In Retrospect These Journeys Loom Very Large": Carobeth Laird's Encounter With an Angry God and Limbo
Authors: Kamel Rose
Published: June 2010

Carobeth Laird's Encounter With an Angry God and Limbo unravel the notion that man/self is the focus of autobiography as genre. Instead, Laird's concept of selfhood rejects masculinist centrality and includes American Indians, the elderly, and the western landscape of the early 20th century as self-extension. Ultimately, Laird's strategies for self-recovery illuminate a personal ecosphere in which life writing not only documents but integrates self, history, and myth.
Remarks on the Occasion of the Publication of Called From Within: Early Women Lawyers of Hawaii : March 12, 1993
Authors: Babcock Barbara Allen
Published: June 2010

Writing biography has its distinctly autobiographical moments—as Professor Babcock found from being on a short list of Attorney General nominees.
Tao Xingzhi: Progressive Educator in Republican China
Authors: Brown Hubert O.
Published: June 2010

Tao Xingzhi was one of the foremost educational reformers in Republican China. Educated in Progressivism at Columbia Teachers College, Tao devoted himself to rural reform through the education of China's peasantry. This biography of Tao examines the interaction of Tao's Western education with his deep roots in Chinese culture, how he turned Dewey to Chinese purposes.
Benjamin Bathurst: The Case of the Missing Diplomat, 1809
Authors: Mason Michael
Published: June 2010

The disappearance of an English diplomat in Prussia in 1809 led to investigations that failed to discover him; but biographers may find that the chief clue to such a disappearance can be the recent mental and medical history of the subject, and the most convincing answer murder for personal gain.
"Albert the Good": Public Image and Private Iconography
Authors: Mancoff Debra N.
Published: June 2010

Prince Albert, Consort to Queen Victoria, is remembered as a loving husband, a devoted father, a patron of the arts and a dedicated public servant. Yet, in his time, another image of the Prince appealed to the British public, that as the modern incarnation of a chivalric knight. Albert's own actions, first promoted through a chivalric image, redefined the modern interpretation of the institution. For the Victorian public, the German Prince codified a new manifestation of the British knight—"Albert the Good"—praised in public image and private iconography.
The Identity of Bathsua Makin
Authors: Teague Frances
Published: June 2010

Bathsua Makin's maiden name was not Pell, as scholars have supposed, but Reginald. That identification provides fuller information about this seventeenth-century feminist: one can identify her husband and children, a book she published when she was only sixteen, and her personal connection to Comenius. These new findings suggest that her life and work are more significant than previously realized.
Resistance and Subversion in the Letters of Alice James
Authors: Jacobson Joanne
Published: June 2010

Letter writing enabled Alice James to resist her consignment to a personally limiting—and publicly authorized—language and narrative. While James accepted the gendered privatization of speech which this marginally "literary" form imposed, she also managed in her letters to exploit the access to language which privatization extended to her, and thus to contest her marginalization.
Macro-History as Metaphor for Biography: An Essay on Macro and Micro History
Authors: Galtung Johan
Published: June 2010

The article is an effort to relate biography, the history of an individual, and sociography, the history of a society. The focus is on the deeper aspects of both; on personality in the case of the individual and cosmology or deeper structure for the society. Eight models of the phases of human personality, and eight models of the phases or stages of social deep structure are then presented, with efforts to use the personal models on society and the social models on personality. The article is an exercise in the possible isomorphism between the two. The cyclical theories which applied to societies were found particularly useful in modeling individual life-cycles; the linear theories less so because they "condemn" the individual to a definite final state of affairs.
The Many Lives of T. E. Lawrence: A Symposium
Authors: Orlans Harold
Published: June 2010

The many biographers of T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935), hero of the 1916-18 Arab revolt and author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom , depict two different men: a versatile genius and a vain faker. In their conflicting answers to five questions, six biographers show the difficulty of reconciling the evidence about this remarkable, complex, and wily man.
Masataro Sawayanagi (1865-1937) and the Revised Elementary School Code of 1900
Authors: Kobayashi Tetsuya
Published: June 2010

This paper introduces English-speaking readers to the influential Japanese educator Sawayanagi Masataro (1865-1927). Sawayanagi, little known outside of Japan, is truly one of the great figures in the history of modern Japanese education. An "enlightened bureaucrat," Sawayanagi held numerous important education posts, but is probably best remembered for his contributions to the Revised Elementary School Code of 1900.
Reading the Writing in the Drafts of Edward Gibbon's Memoirs
Authors: Pearson John H.
Published: June 2010

After the completion of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , Edward Gibbon began writing his memoirs assuming that readers of the history would be interested in the historian. As Gibbon began writing the autobiography, however, he developed a personal motive-to expand the narrow scope of his existence by examining his past. The conflicting motives for writing caused Gibbon to rewrite the autobiography six times in five years. This study examines these six drafts and argues that the revisions suggest Gibbon's struggle to discover a form that would allow him to be both autobiographic subject and self-historian.
Robert Dale Owen's Threading My Way and Victorian Autobiography
Authors: Machann Clinton
Published: June 2010

Threading My Way (1874) is the autobiography of Robert Dale Owen, the son of Robert Owen, the renowned social philanthropist. The work covers Owen's life only to the age of twenty-five, when he began his life as an American citizen. Threading My Way can be usefully compared with other Victorian autobiographies such as John Stuart Mill's Autobiography (1873) and Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907), both because it treats the father-son relationship as central to the narrative of self-development and because it documents social history in a powerful way. An especially significant aspect of Owen's self-history is the transition from British to American society and culture.
The Biographer as Sleuth: Using the Concentric Circle Method
Authors: Townsend Lucy F.
Published: June 2010

How does one research a biography? This essay reveals how a biographer explores the life of a nineteenth-century woman college founder. The biographer is compared to a sleuth, who places the subject in the center of the circle and investigates her life in ever-widening circles.
Great Little Persons
Authors: Manis Jerome G.
Published: June 2010

The article offers an alternative perspective to the traditional focus on great men in history and biography. Looking at the lives of great little persons can lead us to more comprehensive truths and to richer understanding of the human condition.
Confession and Concealment in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell
Authors: Bell Robert H.
Published: June 2010

Bertrand Russell wrote versions of spiritual autobiography throughout his life, and in its final form his Autobiography resembles inchoate spiritual autobiography. Equally strong, though, is the doubt of the perpetually inquiring skeptic. Russell presents a series of transient revaluations and glaring discontinuities between his emotional and intellectual aspects. As a narrator he is most remarkable for "the absence of the presence," a vision both lucid and murky, wherein candor vies with self-delusion, insight with blindness. Aware of something he called "Satanic mysticism," he struggled with suicidal despair. Philandering was a desperate means of treating his self-loathing and misanthropy, as he reveals indirectly in "concealed confessions." Ultimately there is no grace abounding for this chief of sinners, despite the nobility of so much of his life, expressed movingly in the postscript to the Autobiography .
Bibliography of Works about Life-Writing for the Mid-1980's
Authors: Wachter Phyllis E.
Published: June 2010

Current trends in life-writing are toward the subjective and speculative, with particular interest in diary collections, oral histories of lesser known minority representatives, the evolution of creativity from childhood on, and the reflection of biographers' own life narratives through the reconstruction of their subjects' lives.
Renamed Roses: Lloyd George, Churchill, and the House of Lords
Authors: Rintala Marvin
Published: June 2010

Together, and predictably, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill used the Budget of 1909 to destroy the legislative power of the House of the Lords, the last instrument of power of the landed aristocrats who had ruled Britain for so long. Arnold Bennett's hypothesis, that the continuing prestige of the House of Lords would attract even the most disdainful members of the House or Commons when they were defeated by advancing age, is tested by the examples of Lloyd George and Churchill.
The Other Malraux in Indochina
Authors: de Courtivron Isabelle
Published: June 2010

The publication of Clara Malraux's memoirs was largely responsible for the readjustments that André Malraux's biographers have been compelled to make in their examination of the writer's adventures in Indochina in the mid 1920s. Les Combats et les jeux rectifies accounts of this period, reveals her contributions to the newspaper L'Indochine , and reclaims a past that has been elided by Andre Malraux's silences and those of his earlier biographers.
From Faceless Chronicler to Self-Creator: The Diary of Louisa Galton, 1830-1896
Authors: Huff Cynthia
Published: June 2010

Louisa Galton utilized the annual family diary, designed to memorialize her eugenicist husband, to tell her own story. She subverted her expected role by refusing to assume his voice, by writing of her confinement rather than his scientific prowess, and by her personal ordering of the entries.
Joycezseasidegirls: Gretta, Bertha, Molly and Nora-All from Gibralway?
Authors: Nichols Ashton
Published: June 2010

One woman winds her way through James Joyce's work. Although she appears as three different characters, this female figure remains remarkably unchanged from "The Dead" to Ulysses . An analysis of the relationship between these three characters and Nora Barnacle, the woman who inspired them, reveals the complex relationship between art and autobiography in Joyce.
Ascetic Retreat in the Life and Writings of Madame Roland
Authors: Cisar Mary
Published: June 2010

Private spatial reclusion, including imprisonment, became, paradoxically, Madame Roland's personal device for escaping certain social restraints, particularly those of her sex and class. Although she rejected the content of Christian faith and the otherworldly disposition of the ascetics, she appropriated the form of the vita contemplativa to her own life.
Eleanor Roosevelt: Joseph Lash's "Eternal Mother"
Authors: Isenberg Nancy G.
Published: June 2010

Biographical portrayals of women provide important models for examining the problematic nature of traditional biography. One pervasive archetype is the image of the "eternal mother," which clearly emerges in the religious themes and narrative strategies used by Joseph Lash in his biographical studies of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Bibliography of Works About Life-Writing for 1984
Authors: Wachter Phyllis E.
Published: June 2010

Biographical trends in 1984 include continued interest in autobiography and oral history as well as more interest in reevaluation of minority figures and women.
The Annual Biography Evaluative Survey: The Continuing Dialogue: What Makes A Biography Worth Reading?
Authors: Fredericks Kaye
Published: June 2010

The second Annual Biography Evaluative Survey attempts to begin a serious dialogue to further identify criteria that can be used to judge the value of a biography. Twenty-one readers, scholars, and writers respond and are quoted here.
Fictive Text and Transcendental Self: Carlyle's Art of Biography
Authors: Vanden Bossche C. R.
Published: June 2010

For Carlyle, the ideal biography, which represents the essential or transcendental self, can only be approximated. In practice this means that fictive recreation replaces imaginative creation. In his biographical essays, Carlyle increasingly depicts the self as unknowable while he correspondingly employs fictive devices more self-consciously.
Jefferson and Erikson, Politics and the Life Cycle
Authors: Weiland Steven
Published: June 2010

The importance of Erik H. Erikson's study of Thomas Jefferson, Dimensions of a New Identity (1974), belies its brevity and unusual biographical technique. It represents a style of cultural history which artfully integrates the legacy of orthodox psychoanalysis with adaptations and revisions proposed by Erikson and scholars in other disciplines. Dimensions of a New Identity is also a record of crucial elements in Erikson's own life history, especially his incorporation of distinctly American themes into his theoretical and clinical work.
"Becoming the Other": Empathy and Biographical Interpretation
Authors: Frank Gelya
Published: June 2010

Empathic acts are widely employed in everyday life to establish knowledge, accurate or inaccurate, about the experiences of other people. Such acts are occasionally documented in popular biographies when authors leave evidence of having projected their own experiences upon the life of a subject to create a more coherent narrative. In the social sciences, empathy may similarly play a significant, but rarely documented role in the interpretation of others' lives. Within the phenomenological tradition, empathy may be described as an act of consciousness in which one orients to objects and their value in another's experience. Materials from a life history of a woman born with quadrilateral limb deficiencies are presented, to demonstrate a method for clarifying the accuracy of one's own empathic constructs with living subjects. The method may be applied to general biography writing.
The Life of Francis Stuart: Questions and Some Answers
Authors: Molloy Francis C.
Published: June 2010

The Irish novelist Francis Stuart, born 1902, has had a long and varied life, but despite the publication of a major autobiographical work, Black List, Section H (1971), where he explores many aspects of that life, a number of questions remain. In the following article, some major themes in his life are discussed and the unanswered questions posed.
The Annual Biography Evaluative Survey
Authors: Slackman Michael
Published: June 2010

This first attempt to establish an evaluative ranking of biographies by a large cross section of readers, writers, and scholars will become an annual event. The poll seeks to contribute to the development of clearer criteria for judging biographies and to the definition of the field of biographical studies.
The Sense of Estrangement From One's Previous Self in the Autobiographies of Arthur Koestler and Edwin Muir
Authors: Handel Amos
Published: June 2010

In their autobiographies, both Koestler and Muir describe the sense of estrangement they feel toward a particular self in their past. An examination of the two autobiographies suggests that this sense of estrangement may serve as a complex defensive operation for coping with contradictory, affect-laden self-appraisals of change and sameness that touch upon the core of one's identity and reflect one's unresolved conflicts with respect to the essence of that core.
Mori Ōgai and Biography as a Literary Genre in Japan
Authors: Marcus Marvin
Published: June 2010

This paper traces landmarks in the evolution of biographical writing in Japan, focusing on the pivotal role of Mori Ōgai (1862-1922) and his pioneering trilogy of biographies, in particular the first of these, Shibue Chūsai (1916), the biography of a physician and Confucian scholar of nineteenth-century Japan.
The Evolution of an Anarchist: An Autobiographical Statement by Varlaam Tcherkesoff, 1846-1925
Authors: Startt James D.
Published: June 2010

Born a Georgian prince, Tcherkesoff became involved in the Russian revolutionary movement in the 1860s. Imprisoned for those activities, he escaped to England where he lived in exile for forty years. He was a close friend of Peter Kropotkin, the best known Russian anarchist of the late nineteenth century.
Reconstructing the Person: The Case of Clara Shortridge Foltz
Authors: Babcock Barbara Allen
Published: June 2010

Addressing the biographical problem of a public person whose private papers are unavailable, this essay draws upon court documents, contemporary letters and newspapers to tell the story of Foltz's becoming a lawyer and divorcing her husband. It also explores the temporal and other connections between the two events.
Fantasy and Reality in the Death of Yukio Mishima
Authors: McAdams Dan P.
Published: June 2010

Themes of blood, passion, night, anality, and homosexuality are explored in the writings of the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, who committed ritual suicide in 1970. The writings of Sigmund Freud, W. R. D. Fairbairn, Harry Stack Sullivan, and David Bakan inform the psychological interpretation.
Cultural Identity and Americanization: The Life History of a Jewish Anarchist
Authors: Shor Francis
Published: June 2010

If, as Dilthey contends, the individual is a "point of intersection" for historical and cultural structures, then one must account for the social and psychological dynamics of that intersection. Following the insights of Dilthey, the paper turns to an inquiry of the relevant work of Sartre and Erikson. The theoretical perspectives of Dilthey, Sartre, Erikson, and their interpreters are critically analyzed in order to investigate the concept of cultural identity and the process and movement for Americanization which developed in the first part of the twentieth century. By focusing on the life and projects of Joseph J. Cohen, a Jewish immigrant and anarchist, a case study is developed for the exploration of the meaning of cultural identity and radicalism in American life.
Young Kennan's Criticisms and Recommendations
Authors: Mayers David
Published: June 2010

After serving for more than a decade abroad as a US diplomat, George Kennan was recalled home for one year in 1937. During this period he considered ways of dealing with problems then afflicting American society. A short time later he made recommendations on how to improve the Foreign Service. His proposals in both cases were startling and seem to confirm the wisdom of John Quincy Adams: US diplomats should take leave home every few years in order "to be renovated by the wholesome republican atmosphere of their own country."
Chess Problems and Narrative Time in Speak, Memory
Authors: Gezari Janet
Published: June 2010

The chess problem solver's experience in time is importantly related to the experience of reading Nabokovian narrative. Two of Nabokov's own chess problems that are included in Speak, Memory not only reveal his fascination with the experience of possible and actual events but model the way the autobiography discovers and sustains connections between events.
Deborah Norris Logan, Feminist Criticism, and Identity Theory: Interpreting A Woman's Diary Without The Danger of Separatism
Authors: Barr Marleen
Published: June 2010

Feminist scholars are devoting much attention to unearthing women's diaries and letters. As they develop new theories to interpret these noncanonical works, feminists should not dismiss other theories generated by the male critical establishment. To provide one link between new feminist scholarship and existing male-generated theory, this essay explains why it is fruitful to illuminate a woman's diary—the diary of Deborah Norris Logan (1761-1839)—in terms of Norman N. Holland's notions about identity theory.
Maurice Baring and the Passing of the Victorian Age
Authors: Heussler Robert
Published: June 2010

An overview of Maurice Baring's values is set in the context of a life experience that extended from the last years of the Victorian era to the 1940s. Baring was an original and at the same time a representative of England's literary and ruling classes at the height of their influence.
Roth's Counterlife: Destabilizing The Facts
Authors: Finney Brian
Published: June 2010

Beginning as a therapeutic attempt to recover the facts of his early life, The Facts , Roth's autobiography, turns into a meta-autobiography that reflects on the enigmatic nature of the act of autobiographical writing and that deconstructs its own autobiographical text. The question remains, to what extent is this self-reflexivity a defensive attempt to restrict the reader's range of response?
Personal Behavior, Biographical History, and Literary Reputation: The Case of George Orwell
Authors: Rodden John
Published: June 2010

The history of Orwell biography illumines both how personal relations affect the writing of biography and how personal behavior and biographical history interact to shape literary reputation. Ultimately it also raises cultural, ethical, and professional issues about the writing of biography in the post-Stracheyan age.
Charles W. Eliot, Immigrants, and the Decline of American Idealism
Authors: Wagoner Jennings L.
Published: June 2010

Charles Eliot, president of Harvard University from 1869-1909, was a leading educational spokesman and untiring advocate of social reform causes. His liberal position on the open-door immigration policy became a minority view as nativism increased in the early decades of this century and his own belief in assimilation evolved gradually into an advocacy of cultural pluralism.
Attitude, Drama, and Role in Strachey's Elizabeth and Essex
Authors: Overend Eileen
Published: June 2010

In Elizabeth and Essex dramatic conventions play a generative role in the arbitration between life and art which the creative act represents. The intensity with which the lives of biographer and biographee intersect shapes the formal unity of Strachey's "tragic history" even as it threatens to eclipse the identity of his subjects.
The Spurious Articles In Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography —Some New Discoveries and Considerations
Authors: Dobson John Blythe
Published: June 2010

Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography , one of the most comprehensive biographical dictionaries for the New World ever published, was discovered in 1909 to contain articles which are complete fabrications, treating of persons who never existed. 84 such forgeries have been discovered by previous writers. Four more are identified here, and the question of their authorship considered.
A Different Form of "Self": Narrative Style in British Nineteenth-Century Working-class Autobiography
Authors: Hackett Nan
Published: June 2010

Although autobiography, especially works by obscure people, has become popular, literary critics have ignored the rhetorical or literary devices used by nineteenth-century British working-class autobiographers. However, what seems to be an absence of rhetorical flourishes or personal style is a reflection of political and social reality. The plain narratives in which they emphasize repeatedly their truthfulness aptly parallel their lives and serve their purpose to promote social concerns to outsiders.