EDITORS’ NOTE, iii

ARTICLES

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

While mainstream modernist (auto)biographical texts separate the Victorian age from modernity by the forceful impact of the Oedipal rebellion, J. R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself demonstrates that the two ages are drawn together by transgressive father-son desire. The memoir challenges heteronormative masculinity, and belongs to the separate subgenre: the queer Künstlerroman.

Owning Memory: Elizabeth Bishop’s Authorial Restraint
Ann K. Hoff, 577

This essay examines the restraint Elizabeth Bishop exerts over her readers. By limiting readers to the exterior of her memories, Bishop places them in the same untenable positions she was in as a child. Through careful withholding, Bishop maintains ownership over her autobiography and keeps her life’s stories infused with possibility—like pictures of tantalizing, foreign lands.

Annual Bibliography of Works About Life Writing, 2007–2008
Phyllis E. Wachter, 595

REVIEWS

Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, by Susan Brown, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy
Reviewed by Alison Booth, 725

Borders and Travellers in Early Modern Europe, edited by Thomas Betteridge
Reviewed by Peter C. Mancall, 735

Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography, by Katherine Hodgkin
Reviewed by David Lederer, 738

Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness, by Lisa Diedrich; Illness and the Limits of Expression, by Kathlyn Conway
Reviewed by Rita Charon, 740

Unfitting Stories: Narrrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma, edited by Valerie Raoul, Connie Canam, Angela D. Henderson, and Carla Paterson
Reviewed by Susannah B. Mintz, 744

That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity, by James Dawes
Reviewed by Makau Mutua, 748

Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, edited by Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu Lughod
Reviewed by Tareq Y. Ismael, 751

Crises of Memory and the Second World War, by Susan Rubin Suleiman
Reviewed by Lars Fischer, 753

They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust, by Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Reviewed by Katherine R. Jolluck, 756

When “I” Was Born: Women’s Autobiography in Modern China, by Jing M. Wang
Reviewed by Jennifer W. Jay, 758

In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism, by Margaretta Jolly
Reviewed by Christina Brooks, 761

Consuming Autobiographies: Reading and Writing the Self in Post-War France, by Claire Boyle
Reviewed by Jane Hiddleston, 763

Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, by José van Dijck
Reviewed by Alison Landsberg, 765

Knowing Dickens, by Rosemarie Bodenheimer
Reviewed by Natalie McKnight, 768

Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples, by Michael Robertson
Reviewed by Matt Cohen, 771

The President and His Biographer: Woodrow Wilson and Ray Stannard Baker, by Merrill D. Peterson
Reviewed by Victoria Bissell Brown, 773

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, 776
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other
works of interest

CONTRIBUTORS, 823

INDEX: VOLUME 31: 2008, 826

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.

ARTICLES

Rape Narratives, Rape Silences: Sexual Violence and Judicial Testimony in Colonial Guatemala
Catherine Komisaruk, 369

Using cases documented in the colonial Spanish judicial archives of Central America, this essay considers litigants’ depositions as a form of collaborative life-narrative, recorded on paper by government notaries in a court system that functioned according to dominant social ideologies. An analysis of the transcribed narratives of certain rape survivors suggests that other rapes were never recorded. Pointing to the ways that legal culture determined which charges would be brought and which cases would be heard in the courts, Komisaruk illustrates both contested and cooperative collaborations between colonial institutions and colonized subjects. These collaborations produced
a historical record of Spanish American life, but also created silences where histories went unrecorded, notably in cases of sexual violence.

“As Gay and as Indian as They Chose”: Collaboration and Counter-Ethnography in In the Land of the Grasshopper Song
Julia Watson, 397

This essay illuminates multiple complexities in collaborative life writing through an analysis of In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country in 1908–09 by Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed, a book in the form of a journal recounting colonial contact between whites and indigenous people prior to the 1910 United States appropriation of native lands in what is now far northwestern California. Arnold and Reed function as amateur ethnographers, narrating a complex tale of encounters and negotiations, but they leave out those that had to do with their lesbian relationship. Thus, their overt collaboration masked that of a more private kind. Watson examines the very complicated speaking position(s) of Arnold and Reed in relation to the native population, their white cohort, and each other, illuminating the various modes of collaboration that emerge from this multiply voiced text: co-optation, coercion, collusion, cooperation, collectivity,
compromise, and camouflage.

Profane Illuminations: History and Collaboration in James Luna and Isaac Artenstein’s The History of the Luiseño People
Kathleen McHugh, 429

This essay studies narrative collaboration in film, focusing on The History of the Luiseño People, produced collaboratively by performance artist James Luna and filmmaker Isaac Artenstein. The film uses the ephemeral quality of performance art to allegorize the loss of a material history that would register its story. Rather than invoking division, plurality, and ambiguity, Luna and
Artenstein limit their film’s historical space to the media and the domestic, and its temporality to a version of what Walter Benjamin called “nowtime.” Although History’s apparent collaboration with negative stereotypes of Native Americans has angered many critics, McHugh reads the film as an instance of Benjaminian “profane illumination.” Her essay details Luna and Artenstein’s profane apprehension of the historical, as she considers their strategies within the contexts in which the film was funded, produced, distributed, and exhibited.

REVIEWS

Clio’s Daughters: British Women Making History, 1790–1899, edited by Lynette Felber
Reviewed by Stephanie Barczewski, 461

Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England, by Catherine Sanok
Reviewed by Nancy Bradley Warren, 463

Whore Biographies, 1700–1825, edited by Julie Peakman
Reviewed by Marilyn Booth, 466

Traveling Economies: American Women’s Travel Writing, by Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman
Reviewed by Sharon M. Harris, 473

Life Writing: Autobiography, Biography, and Travel Writing in Contemporary Literature, edited by Koray Melikoğlu
Reviewed by Jonathan Tadashi Naito, 475

The Cambridge Companion to the African-American Slave Narrative, by Audrey Fisch
Reviewed by Jesse L. Dunbar, 478

Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of Itself, by Donald Harman Akenson
Reviewed by Kathleen Flake, 480

The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography, edited by Thomas Söderqvist
Reviewed by Theodore M. Porter, 484

Le Propre de l’écriture de soi, by Françoise Simonet-Tenant
Reviewed by Zahi Zalloua, 486

This Crazy Thing a Life: Australian Jewish Autobiography, by Richard Freadman
Reviewed by Suzanne Rutland, 489

Lights, Camera, History: Portraying the Past in Film, edited by Richard Francaviglia and Jerry Rodnitzky
Reviewed by Ina Rae Hark, 491

Sporting Lives: Metaphor and Myth in American Sports Autobiographies, by James W. Pipkin
Reviewed by Peter Carino, 494

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, 497

Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

CONTRIBUTORS, 553

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

This paper examines the relationship between two very different forms of self-representation using alphabetic characters. One is a printed text, Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland (1904), a canonical work of white colonial Australian life writing. The other is a set of meaningful raised scars or cicatrices carved by Tom Petrie into the arms of twenty-five Aboriginal men at their own request. Were the marks a form of slave brand, and Tom Petrie a de facto slave owner? Or was he a backwoods amanuensis to a group of Indigenous men whose traditions of bodily inscription were beginning to accommodate alphabetic characters as a mode of self-representation?

Proof of Life: Memoir, Truth, and Documentary Evidence
Carolyn Kraus, 245

While searching for the truth behind the peculiar and contradictory story of her father’s past, the writer explores the many ways public and private documents can speak—not only through words and images, but also through silence, deception, and duplicity.

REVIEWS

The Mind’s Eye: Image and Memory in Writing about Trauma, by Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy
Reviewed by Carra Leah Hood, 269

Identity’s Strategy: Rhetorical Selves in Conversion, by Dana Anderson
Reviewed by Suzanne Diamond, 278

Transculturing Auto/Biography: Forms of Life Writing, edited by Rosalia Baena
Reviewed by Marlene Kadar, 282

Genèse et autofiction, by Catherine Viollet and Jean-Louis Jeannelle with Isabelle Grelle
Reviewed by Armine Kotin Mortimer, 285

Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, by Richard Bauckham
Reviewed by Telford Work, 290

Stories of Joseph: Narrative Migrations between Judaism and Islam, by Marc S. Bernstein
Reviewed by Burton L. Visotzky, 295

Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography, by Marcus Mosely
Reviewed by Benjamin Nathans, 297

Renaissance Monks: Monastic Humanism in Six Biographical Sketches, by Franz Posset
Reviewed by Duane A. Rudolph, 303

The Value of Worthless Lives: Writing Italian American Immigrant Autobiographies, by Ilaria Serra
Reviewed by Phylis Cancilla Martinelli, 305

Visibly Different: Face, Place and Race in Australia, edited by Maureen Perkins
Reviewed by Andrew Jakubowicz, 308

Writing Desire: Sixty Years of Gay Autobiography, by Bertram J. Cohler
Reviewed by Mark McClelland, 310

Crossing the Divide: Representations of Deafness in Biography, by Rachel M. Hartig
Reviewed by Brenda Jo Brueggemann, 312

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, 313
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

CONTRIBUTORS, 366

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.

ARTICLES

Autography’s Biography, 1972–2007
Jared Gardner, 1

This essay studies the development of the autobiographic comic, beginning in 1972 with the pioneering work of Justin Green, Aline Kominsky, Harvey Pekar, and Art Spiegelman, and culminating in the contemporary work of graphic autobiographers such as Alison Bechdel, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Lynda Barry.

Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
Julia Watson, 27

Fun Home is an autographic narrative about memoirs, memory, and acts of autobiographical storytelling that mingles irony and pathos in the coming-out/coming of age story of young Alison in an “artistic, autistic” family who run a funeral home. Its multimodal text interweaves allusions to Modernist literary texts and feminist manifestoes with drawn photographs and diverse cartooning styles. This essay explores Bechdel’s graphing of subjectivity at multiple interfaces, and examines her use of ambiguous “evidence” for a father-daughter coming-out story that is both indictment and posthumous homage.

Multimodal Constructions of Self: Autobiographical Comics and the Case of Joe Matt’s Peepshow
Dale Jacobs, 59

As we think about autobiography, it becomes necessary to broaden our ways of thinking about texts. In order to do so, we need to consider how creators of autobiographical comics use words and images to produce meanings at the intersection of multiple modal systems—meanings unavailable in either
pictures or words alone. Working through the theoretical and practical connections between multimodality and theories of autobiography, this article explores the ways in which questions of autobiography are addressed in the comics form through an examination of Joe Matt’s Peepshow, an autobiographical comic that has been published at varying intervals since 1992.

Auto/Assemblage: Reading the Zine
Anna Poletti, 85

This article investigates the zine as a compelling example of autographics, theorizing the dynamics of self-representation in these handmade texts. Reading the intersection of text, layout, and production as a complex site of self-representation, the materiality of the zine form is examined as a meta-critical
reflection on the form of the book and the potential of the photocopier as a means of production.

The Endurance of Ash: Melancholia and the Persistance of the Material in Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? oder Theater?
Carolyn F. Austin, 103

This essay examines Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? oder Theater?, a roman à clef made up of nearly eight hundred paintings with textual annotations. This complex interrelation of visual and verbal elements refuses to acknowledge the usual distinction between painting’s visuality and materiality and language’s purely symbolic signification. In fact, Salomon is preoccupied with the materiality of signification—with the shapes and colors with which signifiers are made. The essay draws on Judith Butler’s and Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic examinations of how melancholic art preserves the lost maternal/material Thing in the letter-shapes and sounds that make signification possible. Such a project would have appealed to Salomon, who inherited melancholic tendencies towards suicide from her maternal family. Salomon is particularly troubled by her mother’s and grandmother’s suicides, and depicts their mangled bodies after they have thrown themselves to their deaths. However, Salomon reclaims those bodies in her signature, an intertwined C and S, which mimics the outlines of her mother’s and grandmother’s bodies. Salomon’s signatory mark, which refers to the name of the father, also preserves the body of the mother, and asserts the necessary relation between material symbol and immaterial signification.

Intimate Pasts Resurrected and Released: Sex, Death, and Faith in the Art of José Legaspi
Michelle Antoinette, 133

José Legaspi is one of the few openly gay visual artists in the Philippines, a predominantly Catholic society that generally still has much difficulty accepting the idea and practice of homosexuality. Often autobiographical in nature, Legaspi’s contemporary art installations, sculptures, and drawings bring together image, text, and materiality to bear witness to dark personal life-narratives relating to his homosexuality and Catholicism in the Philippines. His “auto-graphic” reflections record explicit depictions of his own sexuality, sardonic critiques of religious repression, and anguished and often violent reflections on the life and death of those most dear and hateful to his heart.

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, 161
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

CONTRIBUTORS, 221

Cover Art

Editors’ Note, iii

ARTICLES

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

If contemporary depression narratives sometimes allude to the difficulty of representing such an elusive subject as depression, ultimately they purvey an ostensibly “final” knowledge. Reading such narratives by William Styron, Nancy Mairs, and Andrew Solomon, I argue that, in purveying such knowledge, these texts, often presented as “useful,” may at the same time reproduce depression’s central dilemma—symptomatically reenacting the failure of meaning at depression’s center.

Mediating Historical Memory in Family Memoirs: K. Connie Kang’s Home Was the Land of Morning Calm and Duong Van Mai Elliott’s The Sacred Willow
Rocío G. Davis, p. 491

This essay analyzes forms of historical mediation through auto/biographical writing by proposing how history may be mediated structurally and thematically. Using K. Connie Kang’s Home was the Land of Morning Calm (1995) and Duong Van Mai Elliott’s The Sacred Willow (1999), the article explores how Asian/American family memoirs also create cultural memory to empower a community through historical knowledge and awareness of cultural location in society.

Annual Bibliography of Works About Life Writing, 2006–2007
Phyllis E. Wachter and William Todd Schultz, p. 512

REVIEWS

Satan: A Biography, by Henry Ansgar Kelly
Reviewed by James H. Morey, p. 633

Imagining the Sacred Past: Hagiography and Power in Early Normandy, by Samantha Kahn Herrick
Reviewed by David Crouch, p. 635

Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices, edited by Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly
Reviewed by Jessica C. Murphy, p. 637

The Captive’s Position: Female Narrative, Male Identity, and Royal Authority in Colonial New England, by Teresa A. Toulouse
Reviewed by Ralph Bauer, p. 640

Rhetorical Drag: Gender Impersonation, Captivity, and the Writing of History, by Lorrayne Carroll
Reviewed by Teresa A. Toulouse, p. 642

Aspects of Samuel Johnson: Essays on His Arts, Mind, Afterlife, and Politics, by Howard D. Weinbrot
Reviewed by Greg Clingham, p. 645

The Wake of Wellington: Englishness in 1852, by Peter W. Sinnema
Reviewed by Cornelia Pearsall, p. 649

Race and Form: Towards a Contextualized Narratology of African American Autobiography, by Dejin Xu
Reviewed by Jennifer Terry, p. 651

Scripted Geographies: Travel Writings by Nineteenth-Century Spanish Authors, by Gayle R. Nunley
Reviewed by Jorge L. Bacelis, p. 654

Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, edited by Jeffrey Ruoff
Reviewed by Joel Black, p. 658

Ecritures du moi et idéologies chez les romancières francophones, by Tang Alice Delphine
Reviewed by Brian Gordon Kennelly, p. 661

Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory, by Christopher Bigsby
Reviewed by Lars Fischer, p. 663

The Philosopher’s I: Autobiography and the Search for the Self, by J. Lenore Wright
Reviewed by Marya Schechtman, p. 666

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 670
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 724

INDEX: VOLUME 30: 2007, 727

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.

James Gregory
Eccentric Biography and the Victorians, p. 342
This essay examines a neglected biographical sub-genre—collective “eccentric biography”—in its Victorian form. It contextualizes the genre by outlining its early-modern origins in character books and collections of wonders, and by relating Victorian versions to a wider press and public interest in eccentrics. The essay addresses readership, critical reception, publishing history, and the relationship of eccentric biography to the poetry of William Wordsworth, and to the fiction of Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, as well as reasons for the absence of new collections after the 1860s.

REVIEWS

Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit, by Gillian Whitlock, p. 377
Reviewed by John Marx

Autobiography, Travel, and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal, by Javed Majeed, p. 379
Reviewed by Philip Holden

Remembering War: The Great War between History and Memory in the Twentieth Century, by Jay Winter, p. 382
Reviewed by Daniel Todman

Writing Medieval Biography: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow, edited by David Bates, Julia Crick, and Sarah Hamilton, p. 387
Reviewed by Anne J. Duggan

The Holy Bureaucrat: Eudes Rigaud and Religious Reform in Thirteenth-Century Normandy, by Adam J. Davis, p. 389
Reviewed by Nicholas Vincent

The Recycled Bible: Autobiography, Culture, and the Space Between, edited by Fiona C. Black, p. 393
Reviewed by Jennifer Rycenga

Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, edited by Antoinette Burton, p. 397
Reviewed by Mark Allen Greene

Writing the Roaming Subject: The Biotext in Canadian Literature, by Joanne Saul, p. 400
Reviewed by Linda Warley

Métamorphoses du journal personnel. De Rétif de la Bretonne à Sophie Calle,
edited by Catherine Viollet and Marie-Françoise Lemonnier-Delpy, p. 402
Reviewed by Raylene Ramsay

Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women’s Narratives of Slavery, by DoVeanna S. Fulton, p. 406
Reviewed by Joycelyn Moody

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 412
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 461

Editors’ Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Susan Bruce
Sherston’s Imaginary Friend: Siegfried Sassoon’s Autobiographical Prose and the Idea of Photography, p. 173
In this essay, I take Siegfried Sassoon’s prose works as exemplary of a construction of selfhood peculiar to what I call “narratives of hindsight”: mid-twentieth-century narratives whose first person narrator is constructed out of two selves—an older self who writes, and a younger whose experience he or she relates—whose dual perspectives overlay and mediate each other, neither ever dominating or achieving authoritative veracity with respect to the other. I argue that this familiar (but historically specific) construction of selfhood-in-time is enabled by, and contingent upon, the rise of photography, whose advent ushers in new ways of relating to our pasts, and to our past selves.More generally, insofar as Sassoon is concerned, I illustrate broader ways in which his compulsive reiteration of his past is mediated through an imagination and a memory which is ineluctably photographic, and I try to show the ways in which his “autobiographies,” both “real” and “fictionalized,” are indebted, in general and in particular ways, to early photographic images.

Udi E. Greenberg
Remembering Walter Benjamin: Benjamin and His Biographers, p. 194
Having long ago emerged from years of obscurity, Walter Benjamin functions today as an icon not only among an academic audience, but also in many products of popular culture. Through the examination of three key biographies, this study traces the different meanings given to Benjamin’s life from the 1970s until today.

REVIEWS

Theatre and AutoBiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice, edited by Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman, p. 213
Reviewed by Ryan Claycomb

Musical Biography: Towards New Paradigms, edited by Jolanta T. Pekacz, p. 215
Reviewed by Christopher Wiley

Loving Dr. Johnson, by Helen Deutsch, p. 220
Reviewed by Paul Tankard

Traveling Women: Narrative Visions of Early America, by Susan Clair Imbarrato, p. 224
Reviewed by Catherine Allgor

The Ethics of Working Class Autobiography:Representation of Family by Four American Authors, by Elizabeth Bidinger, p. 227
Reviewed by Michelle M. Tokarczyk

The Era of the Witness, by Annette Wieviorka, p. 230
Reviewed by Catherine Hobbs

From Split to Screened Selves: French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person, by Rachel Gabara, p. 234
Reviewed by Kirsty Ball

C’était Marguerite Duras, 1914–1945, by Jean Vallier, p. 238
Reviewed by Cécile Hanania

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 241
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

LIFELINES, p. 314

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 317

Special Issue: Life Writing and Science Fiction

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION, p. v

John Rieder
Life Writing and Science Fiction: Constructing Identities and Constructing Genres, p. v
Each essay in the issue grapples with problems attending the social and literary construction of personal identities. Juxtaposing life writing and science fiction also suggests that generic identities ought to be grasped as complex social practices that connect discourse and power in a variety of ways.

ARTICLES

Dianne Newell and Jenéa Tallentire
For the Extended Family and the Universe: Judith Merril and Science Fiction Autobiography, p. 1
This article, in exploring why so few SF writers produce compelling or innovative autobiographies, examines Judith Merril’s controversial memoir, Better to Have Loved, written in collaboration with her granddaughter, Emily Pohl-Weary. The memoir authorship and form have no equal in SF circles. Merril (1923–1997) was a central, socially radical powerhouse in the extraordinary “man’s world” of modern science fiction, tracing her career through NewYork City, London, Tokyo, and Toronto between the 1940s and 1990s. Her fractured, nonlinear, and collaborative memoir that “tells it like it was” reflects precisely how she interacted with science fiction all her life.

Lisa Hammond Rashley
Revisioning Gender: Inventing Women in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Nonfiction, p. 22
Employing the same narrative techniques of experimentation and play that characterize her fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin has also created a substantial body of nonfiction. This article explores how her nonfiction continually challenges and questions the role of gender in literature and culture, but also in her own life as a woman writing.

Georgia Johnston
Discourses of Autobiographical Desires: Samuel Delany’s Nevèrÿon Series, p. 48
Science fiction writer, intellectual, and memoirist Samuel Delany reconfigures cultural narratives of sexuality. His science fiction fantasy series Nevèrÿon and his cultural criticism Times Square Red/Times Square Blue create an intertextual echo. The autobiographical intertextuality helps Delany to foreground a desiring gay fetishistic sexual subject as acceptable and normal, a narrative speech act that changes the terms of narrative and sexuality.

Kim Kirkpatrick
Begin Again: James Tiptree, Jr.’s Opossum Tricks, p. 61
This article analyzes how Tiptree taught her audience to question gender and age by planting in her readers the idea of the ephemeral nature of division into age groups and gender: it is the reader’s decision to see what he or she wants to see, rather than just accepting patriarchal definition.

Keith McDonald
Days of Past Futures: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as “Speculative Memoir”, p. 74
This article considers Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go as a text which utilizes memoir as a means of presenting a possible future where human rights are decimated, but where human stories remain. The novel is considered as an example of an ongoing science-fictional model where life-writing acts as a window into a world where the individual’s experiences guide the reader through the speculative world.

Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint
Of Neural Nets and Brains in Vats: Model Subjects in Galatea 2.2 and Plus, p. 84
Building on feminist critiques of autobiography, we argue that bringing together sf and life-writing theory can further critique the ideological connection between narrative mode and bourgeois, monadic subjectivity characteristic of much autobiography, as revealed by our reading of non-humans coming to consciousness in Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 and Joseph McElroy’s Plus.

REVIEWS

Life Writing and Victorian Culture, by Joseph Wiesenfarth, p. 105
Reviewed by Francis O’Gorman

The True Story of Alice B. Toklas: A Study of Three Autobiographies, by Anna Linzie, p. 108
Reviewed by Margot Norris

Reading Charlotte Salomon, edited by Michael P. Steinberg and Monica Bohm-Duchen, p. 112
Reviewed by Brent Ashley Kaplan

The Afterlife of John Brown, edited by Andrew Taylor and Eldrid Herrington, p. 114
Reviewed by Robert Blakeslee Gilpin

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 119
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

LIFELINES, p. 168

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 170

Cover Art

Editors’ Note, p. v

ARTICLES

Erica L. Johnson
Auto-Ghostwriting Smile, Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, p. 563
Jean Rhys’s Smile, Please: An Unfinished Autobiography was not actually written by Rhys, but by novelist David Plante in an act that can only be characterized as ghostwriting. This essay theorizes ghostwriting in the context of autobiography and life writing, and shows how the ghostwriting process results in contested layers of written and spoken texts. Rhys resists the ghostwriter’s displacement of her spoken text by quoting her own written texts verbatim throughout Smile, Please, thus in effect auto-ghostwriting her autobiography.

Kylie Cardell
Bloodsport: Thomas Goltz and the Journalist’s Diary of War, p. 584
This article examines how the war correspondent Thomas Goltz negotiates the representation of war and conflict, and the exigencies of his profession as a journalist, through diary. Particularly in Chechnya Diary, the second in his “Caucasus Trilogy,” Goltz uses the diary to focus on his profession and to make particular ethical and moral dilemmas visible. For Goltz, diary is a political tool, but the problem is it is also a personal device.

Mark Maslan
Biographical Fraud Traumatic Nationalism: Joseph Ellis’s Vietnam Testimony, p. 605
In 2001, the Boston Globe reported that Joseph Ellis, an award-winning presidential biographer and professor of history, had lied to students and reporters about having served in the Vietnam War. This essay presents the Ellis scandal as an example of how traumatic events serve as vehicles for national affiliation, and of how the concept of trauma misrepresents our relationship to history.

Phyllis E. Wachter
Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2005–2006, p. 615

REVIEWS

Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women: Violet Hunt, Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen, Janice Biala, by Joseph Wiesenfarth, p. 726
Reviewed by Max Saunders

Women and the Politics of Travel, 1870–1914, by Monica Anderson, p. 733
Reviewed by Barbara T. Gates

Traveling South: Travel Narratives and the Construction of American Identity, by John D. Cox, p. 736
Reviewed by Edlie L. Wong

Sovereign Selves: American Indian Autobiography and the Law, by David J. Carlson, p. 740
Reviewed by Laura L. Mielke

Late-Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography, by Joanna Summers, p. 742
Reviewed by Elizabeth Schirmer

English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Survey, by Allan Pritchard, p. 745
Reviewed by Peter McCullough

Women Writing Africa. Vol. 2: West Africa and the Sahel, edited by Esi Sutherland-Addy and Aminata Diaw, p. 747
Reviewed by Lisa McNee

Narrating the Holocaust, by Andrea Reiter, p. 751
Reviewed by David Brauner

Hitler’s Face: The Biography of an Image, by Claudia Schmölders, p. 753
Reviewed by Richard T. Gray

La Forme des jours: pour une poétique du journal personnel, by Michel Braud, p. 756
Reviewed by Virginia Ricard

Genèse, censure, autocensure, by Catherine Viollet and Claire Bustarret, p. 759
Reviewed by Virginia Ricard

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 762
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 806

INDEX, p. 809

Cover Art

Editors’ Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

Jaume Aurell
Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Rereading Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegel, p. 425
This article engages autobiographical texts by French historians Fernand Braudel and Annie Kriegal as historiographical sources that help us comprehend the intersection between personal lives and scholarly production. This perspective serves as a reference for comprehending the way historians construct our access to the knowledge of the past to increase our understanding not only of history, but importantly, of the writing of history.

Jennifer Jensen Wallach
Building a Bridge of Words: The Literary Autobiography as Historical Source Material, p. 446
Certain aspects of historical reality can best be captured by literary autobiographies. Historical reality is inherently perspectival. Autobiography effectively describes the universe as it appeared from different acknowledged perspectives, enabling historians to rethink and refeel past experiences. Literary techniques such as irony and metaphor make autobiography a particularly evocative historical source material.

Alexis Harley
“This reversed order of things”: Re-Orientation aboard HMS Beagle, p. 462
This essay explores how Darwin’s Beagle Diary navigates between geographical and intellectual travel in logging a literal voyage of discovery; it focuses on the diary’s allegorical use of geography in a narrative of religious disorientation, and on Darwin’s descriptions of the disorienting effects of encountering different cultures and environments.

REVIEWS

History, Historians, and Autobiography, by Jeremy D. Popkin, p. 481
Reviewed by Allan Megill

Arms and the Self: War, the Military, and Autobiographical Writing, edited by Alex Vernon, p. 486
Reviewed by Frances B. Cogan

Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism, and the Problem of English, by Alan Rosen, p. 490
Reviewed by Natania Rosenfeld

Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust, by Janet Walker, p. 493
Reviewed by Tom Conley

Auto/Biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance, edited by Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner, p. 495
Reviewed by Susan Bennett

Five Empresses: Court Life in Eighteenth-Century Russia, by Evgenii V. Anisimov, p. 497
Reviewed by Ruth Dawson

At the House of Gathered Leaves: Shorter Biographical and Autobiographical Narratives from Japanese Court Literature, by Joshua Mostow, p. 500
Reviewed by Robert Huey

Imagining Lives: Autobiographical Fiction of Yiddish Writers, by Jan Schwartz, p. 502
Reviewed by Amelia Glaser

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 506
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

LIFELINES, p. 559
Upcoming events, calls for papers, and news from the field

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 560