Biographical Content Research Articles

Reality and its Aftermath: Nell Dunn revisits Up the Junction (1963) and Poor Cow (1967)

Nell Dunn’s The Muse (2020) is a biographical book in which the British author presents for the first time the life of Josie, the woman who inspired most of Dunn’s writings during the 1960s. In light of the information provided in The Muse, the aim of this article is to explore the presence of biographical content in two of Nell Dunn’s early works: Up the Junction (1963) and Poor Cow (1967). Utilising textual analysis and historical criticism, this comparative study will assess the degree to which realism operates in Dunn’s depiction of working-class women in her fiction of this period. In order to do so, the main topics of both novels will be considered along with other formal aspects such as the use of language of her characters. Later, all these elements will be compared with the content of The Muse, especially with genuine Josie’s letters and notes from the 1960s included in the volume. The similarities between these two books and the real events presented in The Muse will be useful in determining the presence of realism in Dunn’s early works.

The Presence of Political Parasocial Interaction in the Websites of U.S. Senators

The growing trend of parasocial activity in the digital age raises the question of its role in the relationship between website interface and website user, with specific regard to parasocial activity in politics and the implications of the former. To address this gap, I conducted a QUAL-QUAN content analysis on the campaign websites of each member of the U.S. Senate to identify trends in website interface design that may foster parasocial interaction. Consequently, I validated the findings of the content analysis through a qualitative comparative analysis that utilized accredited sources as a model for what constitutes parasocial interaction. My results were conclusive, with certain website components (call-to-action, social media content, biographical content, newsletter forms, and constituent services) appearing with significant frequency across all campaign websites. When compared with the models of the accredited sources, they revealed that the placement and content of these website components can be purposed to foster parasocial interaction between website interface and website user. However, the results may have been influenced by political bias or the errors of manual content analysis of various website components at a large scale. On a broader scope, this paper hopes to draw attention to a less commonly analyzed form of media, the website, in the field of research on parasocial activity. Furthermore, it may serve as a basis for reflection on the possible effects of the presence of political parasocial interaction on websites on the website user, and the United States’ political processes in an increasingly digital era.

Identifying health related occupations of Twitter users through word embedding and deep neural networks

BackgroundTwitter is a popular social networking site where short messages or “tweets” of users have been used extensively for research purposes. However, not much research has been done in mining the medical professions, such as detecting the occupations of users from their biographical contents. Mining such professions can be used to build efficient recommender systems for cost-effective targeted advertisements. Moreover, it is highly important to develop effective methods to identify the occupation of users since conventional classification methods rely on features developed by human intelligence. Although, the result may be favorable for the classification problem. However, it is still extremely challenging for traditional classifiers to predict the medical occupations accurately since it involves predicting multiple occupations. Hence this study emphasizes predicting the medical occupational class of users through their public biographical (“Bio”) content. We have conducted our analysis by annotating the bio content of Twitter users. In this paper, we propose a method of combining word embedding with state-of-art neural network models that include: Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM, Gated Recurrent Unit, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, and A lite BERT. Moreover, we have also observed that by composing the word embedding with the neural network models there is no need to construct any particular attribute or feature. By using word embedding, the bio contents are formatted as dense vectors which are fed as input into the neural network models as a sequence of vectors.ResultPerformance metrics that include accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score have shown a significant difference between our method of combining word embedding with neural network models than with the traditional methods. The scores have proved that our proposed approach has outperformed the traditional machine learning techniques for detecting medical occupations among users. ALBERT has performed the best among the deep learning networks with an F1 score of 0.90.ConclusionIn this study, we have presented a novel method of detecting the occupations of Twitter users engaged in the medical domain by merging word embedding with state-of-art neural networks. The outcomes of our approach have demonstrated that our method can further advance the process of analyzing corpora of social media without going through the trouble of developing computationally expensive features.

Bir Devvânî Muhalifi: Ebû İshak en-Neyrîzî ve Risâle fî tahkīki hakīkati’l-ilm Adlı Eseri

This article investigates the life and works of the itinerant philosopher Abū Isḥāq al-Nayrīzī (died after 895/1489). It offers a critical edition and analysis of his Risāla fī taḥqīq ḥaqīqat al-ʿilm, which he presented to Sultan Mehmet II. Nayrīzī’s work documents his travels to acquire knowledge, which took him from Shiraz to Istanbul, Istanbul to Tabriz, and Tabriz to Karabakh between 877/1472 and 895/1489. Throughout his travels, Nayrīzī studied in the most important political and scholarly centers of his age. Nayrīzī, however, is best known for his opposition to the famous theologian and philosopher Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawwānī (d. 908/1503). The analysis of this dispute not only uncovers new information about Nayrīzī’s life, but also elucidates his scholarship. The disagreement between Nayrīzī and Dawwānī started with Dawwānī’s reply to Nayrīzī’s al-Risāla al-ḥarfiyya in Shiraz in 1472, written upon the request of Sultan Khalīl. After arriving in Istanbul from Shiraz, Nayrīzī presented at least two treatises to Sultan Mehmet II, in which he criticized famous scholars of the period, including Mollā Khusraw (d. 885/1480), Sinān Pasha (d. 891/1486), Hocazāde (d. 893/1488), Khaṭībzāde (d. 901/1495), and ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Fanārī (d. circa 903/1497). Nayrīzī’s second dispute with Dawwānī took place in the presence of Sultan Yaʿqūb, when Nayrīzī returned to Tabriz from Istanbul. Nayrīzī was defeated in the debate and left to Karabakh. His third dispute with Dawwānī took place over Nayrīzī’s al-Risāla al-qalamiyya, written in 1489 in Karabakh and dedicated to Sultan Bāyazīd II, which provides a personal and scholarly portrait of Dawwānī with a pen-oriented literary narrative. In response, Dawwānī portrays Nayrīzī in a similar way. In qalamiyya works, there are both bitter and sweet criticisms that go beyond philosophical critiques to include personal ones. Therefore, the double-layered literary and biographical content of the qalamiyya treatises provide new information regarding the scholarly atmosphere of the period.

A Form to Dwell In: Narrative and ‘Rhetorical’ Unreliability in Alejandra Pizarnik’s Diaries

This article examines the impact of form on the delivery of information in Alejandra Pizarnik’s Diaries. Literary unreliability - both narrative and what I call ‘rhetorical’ - questions the one-to-one correspondence between content and form. Through rhetorical strategies such as paradox and metaphor, the Diaries subvert notions of authorial control, revisiting the ‘death of the author’, as well as the relationship between the literary and the psychological. Instead of promoting an autobiographical reading of this work as a linear story marked by tragedy, these considerations suggest an alternative, interpretive path: one in which the diaristic text tends towards the absurd and the production of a fruitful ‘nothingness’. Considering linguistic manipulation in this way allows us to situate the Diaries within Pizarnik’s aesthetic evolution, not in terms of biographical content, but according to its critical and experimental engagement with a central, theoretical issue: the (im)possibility for language to represent a reality beyond itself.

The Gender Divide in Wikipedia: Quantifying and Assessing the Impact of Two Feminist Interventions

Abstract Wikipedia has a well-known gender divide affecting its biographical content. This bias not only shapes social perceptions of knowledge, but it can also propagate beyond the platform as its contents are leveraged to correct misinformation, train machine-learning tools, and enhance search engine results. What happens when feminist movements intervene to try to close existing gaps? Through a quantitative analysis of over 11,000 Wikipedia articles, we provide an evaluation of two popular feminist interventions designed to counteract gender inequality within digital information projects. We find that the interventions are successful at adding content about women that would otherwise be missing, but they are less successful at addressing structural biases that limit the visibility of that content. This leads us to argue for a more granular and cumulative analysis of gender gaps in collaborative environments. We also discuss the implications for future scholarship on digital inequalities.

Romanticism and the Letter, ed. by Madeleine Callaghan and Anthony Howe

Reviewed by: Romanticism and the Letter, ed. by Madeleine Callaghan and Anthony Howe Mary A. Waters (bio) Romanticism and the Letter Edited by Madeleine Callaghan and Anthony Howe Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xv + 272 pp. ISBN 9783030293093, $119.00 hardcover. According to editors Madeleine Callaghan and Anthony Howe, their collection Romanticism and the Letter serves to correct a prevailing fallacy that, after an eighteenth-century zenith of fine epistolary prose, the nineteenth century "ushered in a decline in letter writing" that was soon to become "absolute" (1). In consequence, they observe, scholarship has preoccupied itself with mining Romantic letters for their biographical content, treating them as a transparent source of information that is only secondarily the business of the literary critic. In fact, Callaghan [End Page 97] and Howe argue, "it is difficult, if not impossible, to assert a meaningful distinction between an author's letters and their literary productions" (9). The fifteen essays that follow this introduction offer a variety of critical approaches to the correspondence of a range of authors to demonstrate that "the correspondence of the Romantic period constitutes a major literary achievement in its own right" (14). The chapters work together to break down generic distinctions, especially between poetry and letters. Taken as a whole, the volume's essays pose questions that seek to correct what contributor Andrew Bennett describes as the "under-developed" state of epistolary theory (220). They tease out aesthetic individuality and power, explore the creation and performance of an authorial self, describe the cultivation of intimacy and an illusion of proximity, and portray a dynamic publishing culture that was constituted and held together by correspondence. In the volume's introduction, Callaghan and Howe survey the social and physical transformations that affected every aspect of Romantic epistolary communications, from government censorship to improvements in roads and mail vehicles to the uncertainty of international communication in the face of political instability. While this overview gestures toward the increasing number of digitized editions as a chance to consider the material qualities of letters in their manuscript form, this is an opportunity that, for the most part, the volume's contributors overlook. Instead, most work from standard print editions, with only Jane Stabler and Susan J. Wolfson addressing the physical as well as aesthetic qualities of their subjects' correspondence. Wolfson moves from reading William Wordsworth's The Prelude as a "quasi-letter" to Coleridge into noting the qualities that make Dorothy Wordsworth's journals a "proto-letter" for William (65, 67). Meanwhile, the sophisticated and lively poetics of Dorothy's actual letters portray her mountain adventures in terms of spirited agency and imaginative vigor. While Wolfson's discussion considers cancellations, scratch outs, and the transition of ideas and content from correspondence to print, Jane Stabler offers the most detailed consideration of the physical in exploring what Byron's manuscript correspondence reveals about the materiality of the letters for both composer and recipient. Characterized in general by the exuberant excess that marks his major poetry, Byron's epistolary style, like his poetics, develops over time, reworking content and shifting in style between correspondents and occasions to "create a being more intense as it writes" (181), an intensity reflected not only in his style but in his use of paper, pen, and ink as well. The volume's opening chapters concern themselves with two opposing aspects of Romantic literary culture as they are revealed through correspondence. Mary O'Connell surveys letters between several major authors and their booksellers to expose the changing relationships between authors and their reading public, as well as the contours of the Romantic book trade at a time of increasing commercialization. Stephen C. Behrendt, meanwhile, situates the letters exchanged between the Irish quaker Mary Leadbeater and the Irish writer Melesina Trench as reciprocal gifts, circulating literary writing and critical commentary to cement a symmetrical [End Page 98] relationship that mirrors the place-centered literary salon. From here, the volume turns to the correspondence of the first generation of major Romantics. Opening with the commonplace that Wordsworth is a disappointing letter writer, Oliver Clarkson explores how Wordsworth's letters and other prose works expose the contours of disappointment, including frustration with an unappreciative reading public and...

The Gender Divide in Wikipedia: A Computational Approach to Assessing the Impact of Two Feminist Interventions

Wikipedia has a well-known gender divide affecting the diversity of the editor community and its biographical content. This bias not only shapes social perceptions of knowledge, but it can also propagate beyond the platform as its contents are leveraged to correct misinformation, train machine-learning tools, and enhance search engine results. What happens when feminist movements intervene to try to close existing gaps? Through the analysis of over 11,000 Wikipedia articles, we provide an evaluation of two popular feminist interventions designed to counteract digital knowledge inequality. We find that the interventions are successful at adding content about women that would otherwise be missing, but they are less successful at addressing structural biases that limit the visibility of women focused content. This leads us to argue for a more granular analysis of gender gaps in collaborative environments. We discuss the implications for future scholarship on digital inequalities.

Potensi Naskah-Naskah Islam Minangkabau untuk Industri Kreatif sebagai Pendukung Wisata Religi Ziarah di Sumatera Barat

The manuscripts of Minangkabau are mostly the collection of surau tarekat scattered in various places in West Sumatera. Some of the surau are always crowded visited by the congregation. Based on that phenomenon, this research is designed to discover and explore the potency of Minangkabau manuscripts that can be developed as a creative industry. Through these manuscripts are expected to provide support for the development of religious pilgrimage tour in West Sumatera which has not been managed properly and maximally until now. The method of the research applied is qualitative research method with three approaches, namely philology, codicology and creative industry. The data were collected through five stages, namely observation, recording and collection of manuscripts, literature studies, interviews and textual criticism. The technique applied in analyzing the data is based on the phenomenology approach to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the subject of the research. This study concludes that through the organization of the manuscripts containing the biographical content of tarekat scholars and their thought can turn the creative industries on, particularly the publishing sector. In addition, through illumination engineering (decoration in the script) can be developed into batik motifs. The publication of the selected manuscript text and the production of illuminated batik manuscripts can be a unique souvenir of religious pilgrimage tours in surau tarekat in West Sumatera.

Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism

Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism

Los géneros retratísticos durante la II República española en las revistas "Estampa" y "Crónica" (1931-1936): características de un género periodístico en auge

La biografía se introdujo en el periodismo de manera natural a través de los géneros retratísticos. En el siglo XIX, lo biográfico era un contenido sobre todo didáctico que se importaba de la historia o la literatura sin apenas modificaciones. Ya en el siglo XX, fue adaptándose poco a poco a las necesidades y peculiaridades de los incipientes y siempre cambiantes géneros periodísticos, buscando la actualidad de sus protagonistas o introduciendo progresivamente la vida privada y el carácter como contenido biográfico. Este artículo estudia la presencia, forma y contenido de los géneros retratísticos en unas publicaciones y una época claves en esta transformación de lo didáctico a lo periodístico: las revistas gráficas Estampa y Crónica, desde el inicio de la II República española y hasta el comienzo del Guerra Civil

Rachel de Queiroz, jornalista

Apesar de ter sido a primeira mulher a ingressar na Academia Brasileira de Letras e de ser popularmente reconhecida como escritora, Rachel de Queiroz (1910-2003) se definia como jornalista. Neste contexto, apresentamos um ensaio com viés biográfico acerca de sua trajetória neste ofício, enfatizando sua atuação na revista O Cruzeiro, na qual manteve a coluna semanal Última Página entre os anos de 1944 e 1975. Como parte da construção metodológica da pesquisa, fizemos um levantamento das crônicas nas quais a autora discorre sobre o fazer jornalístico e propomos algumas reflexões.

In the Service of His Korean Majesty: William Nelson Lovatt, the Pusan Customs, and Sino-Korean Relations, 1876–1888 by Wayne Patterson

Reviewed by: In the Service of His Korean Majesty: William Nelson Lovatt, the Pusan Customs, and Sino-Korean Relations, 1876–1888 by Wayne Patterson Keiran Macrae In the Service of His Korean Majesty: William Nelson Lovatt, the Pusan Customs, and Sino-Korean Relations, 1876–1888 by Wayne Patterson. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2012. 193pp. Patterson’s short monograph presents, contextualizes and analyzes the correspondence of William Nelson Lovatt, an American customs officer stationed in Pusan in the 1880s, and his family. The letters feature both personal and professional content, covering everything from mundane daily events to critical historical incidents, and the career trajectory of Lovatt as he moves from the customs office in Shanghai to one newly established in Pusan. By shifting focus away from the political epicenter in the royal capital, Patterson’s narrative provides a rather refreshing view of Korea at the time, depicting the daily events of the peripheral, but by no means insignificant, southern port city. While it is primarily biographical in nature, the author carefully links this narrative to the greater political dynamics on the Korean peninsula and in East Asia. The content of the book can be roughly divided into two categories. On the one hand, it is a personalized account of the Lovatts’ daily life in Pusan. Here perhaps what is most striking, considering the locale, is the distinct lack of Korean characters. The Lovatts’ social and business interactions are mainly with foreigners, most of which are Japanese. Pusan is, after all, a city dominated by Japanese trade—a “microcosm of Japan,” as Patterson writes (44). What is also notable is the general dissatisfaction the Lovatts display with their circumstances. They describe socializing with the Japanese, for example, as burdensome, disliking sitting on the floor and eating unfamiliar foods (74). This situation is [End Page 97] only compounded by the fact that the “Western community” is decidedly small, and thus they find themselves the victims of boredom and loneliness (67). Meanwhile, what little they do have to say about Korea and Koreans tends to be negative. Lovatt observes “lawlessness” and “lack of technological development” (73). As with other foreign accounts at the time, moreover, he notes the “shiftlessness” of the Korean people, though he interprets this as an inevitable result of the exploitative social structure: “The people have been tyrannized until they have no enterprise to do work for themselves” (81). The Lovatts’ experience in Pusan, then, can be summed up as mainly Japanese and rather unpleasant, with what little contact with Koreans generally colored by negative perceptions. On the other hand, the book is also a historical account of the 1880s, also known as the “Chinese decade,” in which Chinese influence over Korean affairs reached its apex. The greatest strength of the book, in fact, lies in the manner in which Patterson links the Lovatts’ epistolary musings with the greater regional geopolitical dynamics. Lovatt’s employment is the result of his association with the German Paul Georg von Möllendorf, himself appointed by the agent of Chinese power on the peninsula, Li Hung-chang. East Asian foreign affairs thus frequently feature in Lovatt’s letters. He keenly follows the Sino-French War in 1884, for instance, considering its effect on trade and the position of the Chinese. More locally, the Kapsin coup, taking place in the same year, works in his favor as the Chinese gain the decisive upper hand over the Japanese. But his connections with the Chinese are later undermined when Möllendorf backs the Russian bid for power in Korea—Möllendorf’s dismissal ultimately leads to Lovatt’s as well. If links between biographical content and geopolitical dynamics serve as the book’s greatest strength, however, it is when these links are not so apparent that the book tends to lose momentum. Indeed, some discussions verge on the overly mundane if not trivial. One might be interested to know the Lovatts’ daily diet, for instance (incidentally it did not seem to consist of anything too outlandish: fish, chicken, eggs etc.), but perhaps can do without descriptions of household insects and molding wood (50–51). Meanwhile, there are other times when the attempt to...

Stevenson in the Third Republic: Fiction and Liberalization

Stevenson in the Third Republic: Fiction and Liberalization Robert P. Irvine (bio) This essay analyzes the relation between literary fiction and its historical context in the case of two short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, “Providence and the Guitar” (1878) and “The Treasure of Franchard” (1883). The immediate historical context in which I will situate these texts is the emergence of the third French Republic in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and the Paris Commune. Stevenson’s non-fiction accounts of his experiences in 1870s France in An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey (1879) will provide a vital link between history and fiction, but my purpose is not to read any of these texts for their biographical content. Rather, I aim to trace the political effects that accompany Stevenson’s increasingly confident subordination of his historical materials to the demands of aesthetic form. We can understand Stevenson’s choice of the short story, rather than the historical novel in the mode of Sir Walter Scott, Honoré de Balzac, or Leo Tolstoy, in the light of Regenia Gagnier’s suggestion that “the rise of, and high demand for, the modern short story in the 1880s had something to do with the failure of the organic, panoramic view of the ‘realist’ novel to incorporate a world disintegrating into class and gender perspectives” (Subjectivities 124). For mutually incomprehensible class perspectives are exactly what we will find in “The Treasure of Franchard,” in which the professional gentleman and the vagrant boy are reconciled, not at the level of consciousness, by one learning at last to appreciate the values adhered to by the other (as typically happens in the historical novel), but at the level of agency, by the actions of one providing the material salvation of the other through the compact mechanism of the plot. The politics at stake in Stevenson’s formal strategies are liberal politics, and this essay will try to connect two stories that can be told about the category “liberal” in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, literary critics commonly identify a specifically liberal type of subjectivity established as a norm in a variety of written genres, including the novel, autobiography, and art criticism. In such genres, the liberal subject valorizes its own mental life, and reflects critically on that life, in ways that are conducive both to the cultivation of its own many-sided personality and openness to experience, and to a corresponding critical detachment or distance from the particular society in which it finds itself. [End Page 125] This self-conception can, of course, be understood as a mystification of “bourgeois individualism” (Gagnier, Subjectivities 169) and thus as a naturalization of the economic individualism of nineteenth-century capitalism. However, recent critics have also reasserted the socially critical potential of the liberal subject by tracing its continuation in the aesthetic doctrines of the last three decades of the century. In The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (1996), Linda Dowling argues against seeing the “Aesthetic Movement” of Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, William Morris, and Oscar Wilde as a “flight from politics” (1), incorporating as it does the essentially liberal ideals of disinterestedness and judging for oneself; Regenia Gagnier distinguishes the “liberatory aesthetics” of the last three from the anti-politics of “Decadence” (Gagnier, “Critique” 270, 271). Two more recent works, by Amanda Anderson and David Wayne Thomas, further explore the continuities between Victorian liberalism and aestheticism. Both do so by reassessing mid-century liberalism as a regulatory ideal of selfhood rather than an ideology—an aspiration to “detachment” (Anderson) or “many-sidedness” (Thomas) that remains implicit not only in the writing of Pater and Wilde but also in any critical thinking whatever, even that which in our own time attempts, from a Foucauldian or Marxist perspective, to demystify liberal values as the effects of power (Anderson 23–33; Thomas 14–25). On the other hand, social historians tell a different story about the “liberal” in the same period. Gareth Stedman Jones and Margot Finn, most notably, chronicle “liberalization”: not as a subjective stance but as a social process. “Liberalization” names the gradual...

Affective Learning and Psychophysiological Reactivity in Dementia Patients

We examined the association of faces with biographical information that varied in emotional content in patients with Alzheimer's disease and a healthy control group. During two experimental sessions, participants rated neutral male faces on dimensions of hedonic valence and emotional arousal, later paired with fictitious biographical information. Both groups changed their ratings of the faces according to the biographical content. Free recall and recognition were tested in the second session. Patients neither recalled the biographical information nor recognized the faces, whereas the controls did. In addition, psychophysiological measures were taken in response to the face stimuli. Patients showed significant heart rate modulation as a function of their emotion ratings, whereas the controls did not. No correlation of rating changes with skin conductance was found in any group. Results suggest that psychophysiological reactions such as heart rate changes may indicate preserved affective associative learning in dementia patients despite impaired explicit memory.

Implicit Learning of Affective Responses in Dementia Patients: A Face-Emotion-Association Paradigm

ABSTRACT The aim of the present study was to develop and evaluate an ecologically valid approach to assess implicit learning of affective responses in dementia patients. We designed a Face-Emotion-Association paradigm (FEA) that allows to quantify the influence of stimuli with positive and negative valence on affective responses. Two pictures of neutral male faces are rated on the dimensions of valence and arousal before and after aversive versus pleasant fictitious biographical information is paired with each of the pictures. At the second measurement time point, memory for pictures and biographical content is tested. The FEA was tested in 21 patients with dementia and 13 healthy controls. Despite severely impaired explicit memory, patients changed valence and arousal ratings according to the biographical content and did not differ in their ratings from the control group. The results demonstrate that our FEA paradigm is a valid instrument to investigate learning of affective responses in dementia patients.

Oneself as Others: Aurelius and Autobiography

Scholarship finds the autobiographical Book 1 of Aurelius’s Meditations peculiar in that it (1) lacks direct enunciation of the self , and (2) focuses instead on the description of others , who (3) are themselves stripped of biographical content. Philippe Lejeune’s claim that autobiography aims to construct the account of a life whose diachronicity is completely effaced by its meaning helps make sense of these anomalies. The same aim also motivates the Late Stoic injunction to examine one’s “representations” or phantasiai , which exhibit a specular relation to the subject that has them.

Congenial associates: the biographical essays of William Osler.

William Osler, first Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins and Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, published a volume of biographical essays, An Alabama Student . An examination of those essays reveals Osler's considerable skills as a biographer as well as his frequent failure to resolve the imbalance between their historical and biographical content.

History of Staining

This is the third edition of a book whose previous editor was Dr H. J. Conn. The current edition was initially being written by Dr R. D. Lillie, but was completed by the current authors following Dr Lillie's death in 1979; the first chapter is appropriately dedicated to him and reviews his life and works. There follows a series of 20 relatively short chapters (averaging about five pages each) dealing with the development of classes of various dyes and their applications, intermingled with short chapters on some of the greats in the field, which have a strong biographical content. While interesting to read, the book becomes frustrating when attempts are made to use it as a reference source. If tempted to look up mucin stains, for instance, mucicarmine, PAS, or Alcian blue-high iron diamine, one finds they seem either not to have been mentioned or just touched on. In a

The Road To Ruin: The Beginning Of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey

IN HER RECENT, excellent study Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension. (Rutgers University Press, 1958), Miss Doris Falk has indicated the recurrence of psychological motifs throughout the works of the greatest of America's playwrights. It is hoped that further publication will fully analyze the interwoven biographical content which culminates in Long Day's Journey Into Night. Yet Miss Falk, perhaps taking seriously O'Neill's offhand classification of his one "comedy" as a sentimental interim, has dismissed Ah, Wilderness! as falling outside both tragic tension and biography. Examination of this play, originally labelled a play of reminiscence, alongside the crushing Long Day's Journey, however, abrogates such dismissal and refocusses the "comedy" as a "play of old sorrow." Despite the pitfalls which biographical interpretation sets up, this paper will show that Ah, Wilderness! is unquestionably a play of biographical import depicting that time of adolescent innocence which all men pass through just before they are rudely made aware that life can be a bitter experience, that their heroes are not so untarnished as they seemed in their youth, and that a long journey down a road to ruin awaits some before tears and blood exculpate their dead.