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Abstract: Like most journals, over the years Biography has published special issues or clusters, several of which have been recognized by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals—two Best Special Issue awards, and one Special Issue Honorable Mention (second place). Less common is Biography's longstanding commitment to publishing its "Annual Bibliography of Works About Life Writing," and more recently, its equally substantial "International Year in Review." But from its first issue in 1978, Biography has been principally a forum journal, dedicated to publishing unsolicited articles from a wide variety of disciplines, and solicited reviews of recent critical and theoretical publications devoted to some aspect of life ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Academics across a range of disciplines have investigated the alliance forged between conservative evangelical Christians and the Republican Party in the United States in the last half century (Swartz; Rolsky; Cooper; Casanova). Since the presidential election of 2016, an increasing number of these scholars have also begun to historicize and explain the triumph of that alliance in the victory of Donald J. Trump (Butler; Du Mez; Whitehead and Perry). At the heart of these projects is a question that has been debated at length in both popular media and academic venues: how could a voting bloc mobilized over the course of decades in response to a call for the restoration of family values and Christian morals vote en ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Although numerous studies have been devoted to the close interconnections between psychoanalysis and literature (Berman; Brooks; Kurzweil; Rabaté), the psychography—as a simultaneously psychoanalytic, literary, and lifewriting genre—has not yet been the subject of any systematic reflection.1 Thus, this article aims to introduce a genealogy of the "psychography"—a hybrid writing genre that found itself at the core of early psychoanalytic literature. While the psychoanalytic biography has been recognized by lifewriting scholars as a writing genre essential to the progressive psychologization of biography (Marcus, Dreams of Modernity 124–50), the understanding of psychography as a set of writing practices developed in ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: I shall never forget him because his life is the one I did not have, the life that, for reasons I hope shall never be too clear to me, I avoided or escaped. Not his fate, for I, too, shall die, only his life, with its shadows dominating the brightness, its shadows eventually overtaking its brightness, so that in the end anyone wanting to know him would have to rely on that, shadows. …This essay reads Jamaica Kincaid's 1997 memoir My Brother in relation to the corpus of US American AIDS life writing published in the 1980s and 1990s, which remains a crucial site of legacy making in the ever-shifting global history of AIDS. Falling roughly into a subset in the canon of AIDS writing centered on the act of witness to ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In his preface to Hilda Tablet and Others: Four Pieces for Radio, published by the BBC in 1971, Henry Reed (1914–1986) describes how he had been working on a biography of Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), carrying out his research in libraries and archives during the day and sorting his data late at night. He interviewed many of Hardy's friends and family members, yet these conversations invariably revealed more about the interviewees than his biographical subject: "They were fine men and women. But always, a few nights afterwards, once more sorting my data, I would realise that the main content of their disclosures had concerned, exclusively, themselves" (Reed, "Dedicatory Letter"). This observation provided the starting ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In her graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel builds a world premised on the real-world American town Beech Creek, her family's home, and the funeral home that is their family business. In their contribution to the "Geography & Biography" special issue of Biography, Sarah Ann Wider and Ellen Percy Kraly introduce the idea of a "life-identifying place" (20) and argue that "life writing is invariably place writing" (22). Inspired partially by this connection between place and self, and by Bechdel's focus on place and space in Fun Home, this essay examines how setting and its metatextual illustration might be interpreted as autobiographically representative of its author. Bechdel demonstrates the ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: I hate hate hate having to go back and remember that specific day. But this is for a louder collective voice. #MeToo.On November 12, 2017, Diana Thomson composed her first tweet after having joined Twitter just a few weeks earlier: "#me too," she wrote.1 In late December, more than one month later, Thomson posted the second and final tweet on her profile page: "I'm 73 years young the 1st was my grandfather, Billy; next my mother's second husband Steve; then my brother, Aaron. It started when I was six and continued throughout my adult hood. Thanks for letting me share Alyssa. My name is Diana Thomson."2 This second tweet was posted as a reply to the American actress Alyssa Milano, who on October 15, 2017, suggested ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Until recently, historians viewed biography with skepticism, regarding the genre as lacking scientific legitimacy, with some even referring to it as "the profession's unloved stepchild" (Nasaw 573). Only since the 1980s has biographical research emerged as an accepted and increasingly popular scholarly method of investigation (Caine 152), in what has been dubbed "the biographical turn" (Wengraf et al. 245). This reemerging field is defined in relation to neighboring disciplines—in addition to history, literary science, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and so on (Moulin 5). As biobibliographical studies embrace biographical ones, a necessary part of the biobibliographical turn involves establishing ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The capacious collection Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction explores a range of biofictions, from early twentieth-century texts, such as Virginia Woolf's Flush, to more contemporary twenty-first-century titles. The collection is divided into five sections: "Recovery, Revision, Ventriloquism: Imagining Historical Women," "Re-imagining the Early Modern Subject," "Writing the Writer: History, Voyeurism, Victimisation," "Creativity and Gender in the Arts and Sciences," and "Queering Biofiction." The collection also includes an interview with the novelist Patricia Duncker, which I found valuable in excavating aspects of the creative process, and in exploring the relationship between presentism and ethical ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Through lifewriting texts in various media and modalities, the contributors to Text and Image in Women's Life Writing: Picturing the Female Self engage with text, images, and gender, to reclaim "images of women and by women." The ways that authors and artists deploy images and text may complement, resist, or contradict the other, which enriches the life narrative analysis at the center of the work. Envisioned as a feminist intervention to the field, the collection, edited by Valérie Baisnée-Keay, Corinne Bigot, Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni, Stephanie Genty, and Claire Bazin, acknowledges and explores the cultural and gendered dimensions of the visual, including the objectification of the female body and the work to ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Photographs drive us crazy—or so I heard many years ago from Joel Snyder, an eminent historian of the medium, and it still seems right. Nearly two centuries have passed since Henry William Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre independently discovered how light and chemistry could fix an image on a two-dimensional surface. Yet, their parlor trick continues to intrigue us. The question—which Snyder pondered at length—is why. Where does our fascination with the photograph's apparently perfect match to its subject come from'In Arnaud Schmitt's painstaking, if uneven, analysis, what catches the author's attention—and what, as he notes, preoccupied Linda Haverty Rugg and Timothy Dow Adams before him—is photography's overlap in ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Pramod K. Nayar, the author of over a dozen books, has considerable expertise in the fields of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, Indian literature, and human rights. The Human Rights Graphic Novel represents the fusion of a few of his previous works: Writing Wrongs (2012), Human Rights and Literature (2016), and The Indian Graphic Novel (2016). In bringing together the field of human rights with the graphic novel, Nayar seeks to expand what Michael Galinsky terms "the culture of Human Rights," and citing Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's concept of "globalectics," seeks to generate a "global critical literacy around HR" (5). Although there have been several books dedicated to the study of trauma as represented in comics ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Ana Belén Martínez García's interesting new book aims to "explore the conjunction between human rights fights" in the contemporary Global South, considering six young women advocates who have used a range of "self-narrating paths" and platforms to "excite distinctive" narrative empathy towards their otherwise "transgressive" activism (6). Drawing on key works of lifewriting theory from the past two decades, the book relies on Suzanne Keen's narratological work on "strategic narrative empathy" as a "useful tool" for interrogating and comparing "the narrative construction of human rights life-writing projects" (11). By engaging in various acts of self-representation, Martínez García argues, these young women ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In Transnational Perspectives on Artists' Lives, part of the Palgrave Studies in Life Writing series, contributors explore various perspectives on transnational artists' lives to reconsider how artists have been identified with nations and to examine international influences across cultural differences. In particular, the contributions focus on transnational identities in artists' careers and life writings, biographers' treatment of their subjects' transnationality, and transnational artists' lives as represented in fiction. This wide-ranging approach is useful in offering scholars paths to follow, including not only how to resurrect artists of the past but also how to reimagine their lives in experimental ways ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Julie Rak's False Summit: Gender in Mountaineering Nonfiction traverses the intersection of lifewriting studies and the emergent field of mountaineering studies, unraveling the complex relationship between gender, power, and representation in the climbing world. By examining traditional mountaineering narratives, Rak exposes the cultural construct of a "traditional mountaineering body," and its role in perpetuating gender disparities within the climbing community. She shows how mountaineering literature has glorified the heroic male climber figure that embodies physical strength, mental fortitude, and a "never back down" attitude. This ideal has contributed to the perception of climbing as primarily a masculine ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The "biographical turn" that has marked historical studies in the past few decades has usually been characterized by studies that relate the life of an individual to the social, political, or cultural context of their time, with the implicit understanding that this context is usually limited to a specific geographic area. An outstanding example from my own main field of research, the history of the French Revolution, is Alyssa Sepinwall's The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (2005). The editors of Global Biographies: Lived History as Method offer their collection as an experiment in extending the methods of the "biographical turn" to the domain of global history and to ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In her 2011 MLA Presidential Address, Sidonie Smith speculated that the rapid evolution of digital and other technologies might steer contemporary auto/biographical practices towards what she termed an emergent "posthuman imaginary" (569). "As the posthuman gets a life," Smith noted, "it will be fascinating to observe and engage adaptations of narrative lives routed through an imaginary of surfaces, networks, assemblages, prosthetics, and avatars. Modes of narrating lives will chart these emergent subjectivities and index shifts in the human and posthuman imaginaries" (571). Ever the visionary, Smith foresaw what would in the following decade evolve into an almost dizzying surge in auto/biographical criticism and ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In their introduction to a special issue on the founding conference of IABA Africa in 2017, Sally Ann Murray, F. Fiona Moolla, and Mathilda Slabbert write perceptively of the instability surrounding the term "autobiography." They reason that the term is Western in outlook because "Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson use autobiography to 'refer only to the traditional Western mode of the retrospective life narrative'" (522). To suit the African context, the authors propose the neologism "AutobiogrAfrical," which they define as "a heuristic invention for thinking auto/biographical forms with, through, in, of, above, and beyond 'Africa'" (524). The authors further add that the term "AutobiogrAfrical" is "a strange new ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In Oral Forms of Nigerian Autobiography and Life Stories, Adetayo Alabi discusses the oral life stories and poems about the self and community that the Yoruba and Urhobo people of Nigeria have been telling for hundreds of years. The book considers a number of storytelling genres: the oríkì panegyric tradition in Yoruba ontology, music, and literature; the Yoruba epithalamium tradition; the hunter's chant of the Yoruba; witches' and wizards' narratives among the Yoruba; and udje satirical poetry in Urhobo society and literature. Alabi works against Eurocentric claims that Africans have never produced stories about themselves, and that therefore the term "auto/biography" cannot be associated with work that comes out ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Jocelyn Fenton Stitt's Dreams of Archives Unfolded begins with a piece of speculative fiction in the form of a letter printed in an 1838 Jamaican newspaper, a ghostly missive purporting to be from one hundred years into the future. In that fictional 1938, Jamaica is a "thriving post-emancipation society" (1), supported by important museum and archive collections that testify to the horrors of slavery and make plain the responsibility that the state must bear for perpetuating slavery and its violence for so long. The archives, says the letter, "were unfolded" so that "the history of bondage stood confessed" in its instruments of torture and its bureaucratic documentation (2). The letter appears to be a work of life ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition: Cree and Métis âcimisowina, Cree and Métis author Deanna Reder explores the extent to which autobiography constitutes a component of Indigenous literature. Reder currently works as an associate professor of Indigenous Studies and English at Simon Fraser University, which informs her research and writing. In Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition, Reder argues that autobiography inherently lends itself to traditional Indigenous storytelling, contrary to decades of scholarship disregarding this form as a co-opted and inferior version of European genres. Indeed, Reder combats the interminable valuing of some forms of literature over others in academia ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The year 2023 marked the seventieth year since the signing of the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War (1950–1953) but that resulted in the seemingly permanent division of the Korean Peninsula into North and South along the thirty-eighth parallel. Despite the ongoing tensions and potential for war on the peninsula, the Korean War is often referred to as a "forgotten" event by US historians, partly due to its temporal proximity to the Vietnam War (1955–1975). Thus, Stephen Hong Sohn, an Asian American cultural critic and a descendant of war refugees, works to challenge this general attitude in the West. Through extensive archival research and close examination, he showcases war stories told or written by ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In Negotiating Racial Politics in the Family, Barbara Henkes takes readers unflinchingly into the complex, disturbing, often both painful and infuriating, and occasionally productive intersections between family kinship ties, the politics of race, and racism. The study explores by implication the production of ignorance and the entanglements that bind and divide white families across their intricate structures of inhabitation, responsibility, retreat, and implication. By honing in on several family histories via their "egodocuments" (oral accounts, private letters, travel reports, memoirs, and film footage) during National Socialism in Germany and apartheid in South Africa, Henkes constructs mini-biographical ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In approaching the subfield of autobiography stemming from the Napoleonic Wars, Matilda Greig wisely narrows the focus of Dead Men Telling Tales: Napoleonic War Veterans and the Military Memoir Industry, 1808–1914 to the eventful Peninsular War of 1808–1814. Yet Greig's ambitious project expands out by tracing the afterlives and influences of Peninsular War memoirs, as the subtitle implies, to the doorstep of WWI. Analyzing nineteenth-century editorial interventions, marketplace demands, political machinations, and even educational agendas that shaped, reshaped, and repurposed the original narratives, Greig concludes that "a heterogenous group of Peninsular War memoirs became something resembling a literary genre ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Rebecca Richardson's Material Ambitions, like the individuals who populate one of her key source texts, Samuel Smiles's Self-Help (1859), puts a significant amount of work to excellent use. Taking the values popularized by Smiles's highly influential advice book, a text that stipulated hard work, perseverance, and moral rectitude in the pursuit of success, Richardson demonstrates how such ideals were adopted or modified by a range of nineteenth-century authors. Through the rigorous and well-researched examination of both canonical and lesser-known works of fiction and nonfiction, Richardson frames her study of how these texts responded to the prevalent self-help discourse by considering a corresponding trait: the ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In the collection Speculative Biography: Experiments, Opportunities and Provocations, editors Donna Lee Brien and Kiera Lindsey, and their diverse contributors, explore how a new generation of biographers self-consciously navigate questions of form and ethics. "Speculative biography" is a model of biographical writing in which authors overtly engage with the presence of subjectivity, the instability of facts and records, and the ethics of narration in biographical form. The collection contends with an either/or model for biographical writing (as fact or fiction) that has tended to characterize, and limit, disciplinary debates.Speculative Biography is the first collection of scholarship published to identify and ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Richard Lischer's new book, Our Hearts Are Restless: The Art of Spiritual Memoir, is a cross between academic monograph and devotional guide, annotated bibliography and narrative compendium. Guiding us enthusiastically through a broad range of spiritual autobiographies, Lischer is as committed to motivating us to read these works as he is to explaining how they ask us to rethink modern autobiography in general and Christian autobiography in particular. If we will only read this tradition, he argues, we will see that there are models of spiritual life and forms of life writing that resist and transcend the norms of modernity and its largely secular mode of being. The book's thematic structure accomplishes this work ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: With Magical Habits, Monica Huerta wants to decenter the heroic narrative at the heart of so many memoirs and theories of the self to instead focus on "habits"—the choices we make, the realities we live, and our attempts to enact what we think and believe (xv). She approaches the "I" and "we" of her book, as she states in the author's note, in a "liturgical" sense. She writes that she did not always feel included in a "we" in her own personal life: when the priest used "we" during mass, for example. So in Magical Habits, Huerta reimagines "we" as an invitation to be taken up or left behind (ix), and in this way, she invokes "we" and "us" to invite the reader to act in community, rather than describe what it is. She ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The Art of Identification is a seemingly eclectic collection of essays tied together by their analyses of the individual within a society that defines and identifies the person by slotting them into a specific category. Ranging from social history, science fiction, and crime fiction to forensic anthropology, criminology, and passport identification standards, the contributors present facets of the historic relationship between the person and the state. For pragmatic reasons, the essays center on the development of personal identification technologies in modern Europe and North America from the mid-Victorian era to the present. The essays in each of the book's three sections are grouped by loosely connected ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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