Biography, vol. 32, no. 3 (2009)

EDITORS’ NOTE, v

ARTICLES

Between Candor and Concealment: Willa Cather and (Auto)Biography
Janis P. Stout, 467

Willa Cather’s noted convictions about privacy existed in tension with her more recently understood engagement in self-publicity. This tension is mirrored in her ambivalent thinking about the genres of biography and autobiography. The two genres became a deeply conflicted site for her, and one that often produced self-contradictions. Although Cather took steps to preserve her privacy late in life, she also manifested impulses toward self-writing.

Biography, vol. 32, no. 2 (2009)

EDITORS’ NOTE, iii

ARTICLES

Protecting Life from Language: John Ruskin’s Museum as Autobiography
Hilary Edwards, 297

This essay argues that Ruskin’s Museum constitutes his first sustained attempt to represent his life story, and as such is a crucial precursor to his autobiography, Praeterita. The Museum project fails, but the failure is redemptive: it forces Ruskin to come to terms with the necessity of language for the presentation of memory, and in so doing helps make Praeterita possible.

Biography 32, no. 1 (2009): IABA 2008: Life Writing & Translations

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Shifting Ground: Translating Lives and Life Writing in Hawai‘i
Cynthia G. Franklin and Miriam Fuchs, vii

We open the Winter 2009 issue of Biography by calling attention to “Pacific People,” an evening of oli, mele, hula, theatre, poetry, autobiography, and biography, to articulate the significance of Hawai‘i as the location of the Sixth Biennial IABA Conference. For the contributors to this volume, translation is, in the broadest terms, a form of representation and action that mediates—inevitably by coming between—cultures and languages in genres that are continually emerging. These essays articulate with the concerns foregrounded in “Pacific People,” including a focus on human rights; an insistence on questioning what can and cannot be translated and the difference this makes to people’s lives; attention to translation as a practice that can bring to the surface “buried” lives; an emphasis on how linguistic translation is embedded in contexts unmistakably political and economic as well as cultural; and an exploration of how translation itself can be a form of political action. As evidenced by “Pacific People” performers, and as argued by contributors to this special issue, translation enables both the restitution of pre- and anticolonial histories and traditions, and also the ability to create awareness of other peoples and places, helping to create potentially transformative consciousness of the common and different grounds on which we stand in both metaphoric and literal terms.

Biography, vol. 31, no. 4 (2008)

EDITORS’ NOTE, iii

ARTICLES

My Father and Myself: J. R. Ackerley’s Marginal Modernist Künstlerroman
Helena Gurfinkel, 555

Biography, vol. 31, no. 3 (2008)

IN LOVING MEMORY: LINDON BARRETT, v

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Something Other Than Autobiography: Collaborative Life-Narratives in the Americas—An Introduction,
Kathleen McHugh and Catherine Komisaruk, vii

This Introduction to a special essay cluster on “Collaborative Life-Narratives in the Americas” suggests a field of texts and critical practices, arising from the material circumstances of colonialism in the Americas, that counters traditional autobiographical narrative. The essays explore the complicated relationships among literacy, identity, colonialism, and conquest, as the narration of marginalized lives invokes collaboration with technologies of literacy.

Biography, vol. 31, no. 2 (2008)

Cover art

Editors’ Note, iii

ARTICLES

Slave Brands or Cicatrices? Writing on Aboriginal Skin in Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland
Penny Van Toorn, 223

Biography, vol. 31, no. 1 (2008): Autographics

Cover art

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Self-Regarding Art
Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti, v

This Introduction to the Biography Special Issue on “Autographics” maps a field of texts and critical practices which are emerging in the rapidly changing visual and textual cultures of autobiography. Beginning with a survey of current thinking about the comics, it argues for autographic criticism as a practice that engages with new modes and media, such as graffiti and online social networking, where autobiographical narrative proliferates through fusions of the visual and the textual.

Biography, vol. 30, no. 4 (2007)

Cover Art

Editors’ Note, iii

ARTICLES

Against Depression: Final Knowledge in Styron, Mairs, and Solomon
Lee Zimmerman, p. 465

Biography, vol. 30, no. 3 (2007)

Cover Art

Editors’ Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Nancy K. Miller
I Killed My Grandmother: Mary Antin, Amos Oz, and the Autobiography of a Name, p. 319
Read together as autobiographies of a name, these two very different narratives provide unexpected points of connection to my silenced family story. The essay explores the extent to which my identity as a third-generation American has been entangled with a collective history shaped by the trauma of departure. I reimagine the documents of my personal archive within the grand immigration sagas of the twentieth century.

Biography, vol. 30, no. 2 (2007)

Editors’ Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Susan Bruce
Sherston’s Imaginary Friend: Siegfried Sassoon’s Autobiographical Prose and the Idea of Photography, p. 173