Biographical Subject Research Articles

Fashioning nationality and identity in the eighteenth century: The comte de Bonneval in the Ottoman Empire

Among the colourful characters that populate eighteenth-century military history, the French-born comte de Bonneval (1675–1747) has been kept alive in historical memory longer than most. His surprising conversion to Islam and contribution to Ottoman military reform long made him a popular subject for biography in his own right. Nowadays, he mainly features in biographies of Prince Eugene of Savoy. Both were commanders in the Habsburg army, and for nineteen years they were close companions in war and peace.1 The circumstances that turned Bonneval's friendship with Eugene to enmity also led him in 1729 to offer his services to the Ottoman Empire. For most scholars, this is the moment when his actions became of lasting historical significance. The Ottomans, who suffered in the eighteenth century a series of military defeats, employed foreigners to help them reform their army. After converting to Islam and renaming himself Ahmed Pasha, Bonneval became the first of these when the grand vizier, Topal Osman, invited him in 1731 to reform the Ottoman artillery corps. He moved to Constantinople, added the sobriquet ‘Humbaracl’ (bombardier), and became a noted figure at the court of Sultan Mahmud I. Until Bonneval's death in 1747, Europeans having dealings with the Ottoman regime looked to him for assistance in navigating its internal politics.2

Taina Naita. Narrative Stance in Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

The paper discusses Vladimir Nabokov's novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight as his first English experiment in constructing a model of a possible metaphysical contact between the world of human consciousness and a mysterious dimension beyond it. Nabokov's almost invariable principles of composition make the narrative stance of the novel open to various interpretations; the paper argues in favor of the version in which the title character's secret (Russ. Taina Naita) is his calculated absence from the book of which he appears to be the biographical subject. The Appendix presents some results of archival study of the novel's extant manuscripts.

Does a Dutiful Wife Write; or, Should Suzanne get Divorced? Reflections on Suzanne Curchod Necker, Divorce, and the Construction of the Biographical Subject

Does a Dutiful Wife Write; or, Should Suzanne get Divorced? Reflections on Suzanne Curchod Necker, Divorce, and the Construction of the Biographical Subject. Un article de la revue Lumen (North America at the Crossroads of European Cultures in the Eighteenth Century) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

My words echo thus: possessing the past in Peter Ackroyd

My Words Echo Thus is the first comprehensive evaluation of Peter Ackroyd's body of work, effectively bridging his novels, biographies, poems, and other writings to introduce readers to the fanciful premises, historical settings, and parallel tales that characterize this British writer's prodigious oeuvre. Employing a broadly intertextual perspective, Barry Lewis reveals how Ackroyd possesses the past like a medium, echoing its voices in his work. Best known for his Whitbread Award-winning novel Hawksmoor, Ackroyd writes fiction in the morning and biography in the afternoon. Lewis explores the ways in which Ackroyd allows these two genres to cross-fertilize, each informing the other. Lewis outlines the early influences on Ackroyd's career, assesses each of his books chronologically, and surveys available criticism of the writer. By looking at Ackroyd's work in sequence, Lewis suggests, one can appreciate the synergy between novels that often feature biographical subjects and biographies that are interanimated through fictional techniques. Placing each work in the larger mosaic of Ackroyd's career, Lewis explores the writer's thematic concerns, including London and Englishness, the tradition of Cockney visionaries, the Catholic legacy, the territorial imperative, the paradoxes of time, the continuity of the literary canon, and father-son relationships. Lewis also discusses the significance of the great writers who recur as touchstones throughout Ackroyd's work - William Shakespeare, William Blake, Charles Dickens, and T. S. Eliot.

John Aubrey, Hint-Keeper: Life-Writing and the Encouragement of Natural Philosophy in the pre-Newtonian Seventeenth Century

In a prose satire written by Samuel Butler, 'An Occasional Reflection on Dr Charleton's feeling a Dog's Pulse at Gresham-College', the physician Walter Charlton is said to have invaded the Royal Society's fastnesses 'by Surreptition and Inviolation, and to have secretly deprived the Hint-Keeper' of a precious gift to the Society, the 'King of Macassar's Poison', and to have experimented on it in secret.1 Butler, an acute and well-informed satirist of scientific culture, also talks of the 'Hint-Keeper' in his character of 'A Pretender'. Here, the puffed-up pretender to knowledge 'fancies himself as able as any Man, but not being in a Capacity to try the Experiment, the Hint-keeper of Gresham College is the only competent Judge to decide the Controversy'.2 The character, seemingly Butler's invention, is thus an instrument of moral argument. But who is he, what does 'hint-keeping' involve, and what is the connection between keeping hints and the expression of an ethical position? I propose to answer these questions by considering the idea of the hint and practice of hint-keeping in the writing and scientific pursuits of Butler's friend and biographer John Aubrey, and his circle. I suggest that if we pay attention to the forms of knowledge transmitted and preserved by the hint we may find it to be a containing structure for some distinctive qualities of the culture and values of the early Royal Society. For both Aubrey's scientific practice and the rhetorical forms in which he commemorated the 'fine Notions and Inventions' of his biographical subjects are characteristic of a short-lived moment in the history of science, that of the pre-Newtonian seventeenth century, or the period before the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687.But what is a hint? To begin to answer this, we may revisit the central anecdote of seventeenth-century natural philosophy, in the form in which it was recorded by the antiquary William Stukeley. Stukeley records that he spent a warm April day in 1726 with Isaac Newton. Drinking tea under some apple trees, Newton told him howthe notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to him self. Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth's centre? Assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter: and the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earth's center, not in any side of the earth. Therefore dos this apple fall perpendicularly, or towards the center. If matter thus draws matter, it must be in proportion to its quantity. Therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple.and so on.3 Newton is represented in this anecdote as intuiting his theory in a perfect nutshell, one fine afternoon under a tree, in pastoral solitude in Lincolnshire, with no mention of any scientific community, subsequent correspondence with Hooke, meetings with Halley or any kind of false starts or interruptions: a pre-Adamic, immediate, creation of light. Its narration in this form, as an exquisitely coherent tale, focussed exclusively on its intellectual content, has encouraged Newton's worshippers in their wish to imagine that his theory was 'Invented and perfected at the same time', the praise which, when voiced by Sir John Hoskins at the reception of the first book of the Principia at the Royal Society, so angered Hooke and prompted him to cry plagiary.4 By telling his friend a tale of a theory, so comprehensively intuited in retirement in a garden, rather than a more socialised narration of the path to the mathematically-demonstrated 'perfected' state of the Principia, and its subsequent extraordinary acclaim, Newton gave the world its most powerful biographical image of genius. Paolo Frisi tells the story of the twenty-two months' unbroken solitary concentration which produced the Principia: but it is the divine inspiration, rather than the human perspiration, which gave the apple anecdote its power. …

Three Biographies in Search of an Artist

People who read biographies are trying to satisfy varying degrees of curiosity. Discovering conditions of historical, sociological and psychobiographical possibility, and of certain works and even of the biographical subject—if it is possible—defines the biographical project in a schematic way. If the function of this type of text is indeed to contribute to a better acquaintanceship and knowledge, the exercise wavers between two restrictions: it complies with the historian’s serried task, it ...

Chaucer and the Subject of Bureaucracy

This paper takes its lead from Sheila Delany's important and influential "Slaying Python: Marriage and Misogyny in a Chaucerian Text" (1996). Delany's argument offers a number of theoretical and interpretive interventions in liberal humanist readings of a particular Chaucerian text, the canonical poetic figure of Chaucer and Chaucer as biographical subject. In The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, Derek Pearsall considers Chaucer's acceptance of the post of Comptroller of the Wool Custom and the Wool Subsidy in June 1374 and comments that Chaucer's "career shifted decisively away from the immediate environs of the royal court": the Comptroller's "job itself was something of a chore and not a usual avenue to promotion for an ambitious squire." My argument is that this fourteen-year career as a bureaucrat, coming as it does after Chaucer's earlier periods of military service (1359–60, 1369, 1370) and the years 1366–1378 during which Chaucer undertakes perhaps five diplomatic and trade missions, raises a question about the subjectivity we construct for Chaucer out of the conjunction of public writing and personal history: what might it mean to read a "bureaucratic Chaucer"?

Writing Medieval Biography: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow (review)

Reviewed by: Writing Medieval Biography: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow Anne J. Duggan (bio) David Bates, Julia Crick, and Sarah Hamilton , eds. Writing Medieval Biography: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006. 262 pp. ISBN 184-38-3262-3, £60. In this splendid book, sixteen distinguished authors, most of them biographers in their own right, have collaborated to honor a seventeenth, Professor Frank Barlow, whose lives of Edward the Confessor, William Rufus, and Thomas Becket are models of their kind. Taking the writing of medieval biography as their theme, the sixteen discuss critical questions about the sources which form the core of their subject. How should a modern scholar evaluate the account of women saints whose vitae have allegedly passed through the double filter of translation from a vernacular into Latin and possible manipulation by male authors (Barbara Yorke on Anglo-Saxon female saints)? What chance is there of approaching a subject for whom there is little written evidence (Simon Keynes on Æthelred the Unready), or where it is problematical (Janet Nelson on Charlemagne's "private life"). Can one reconstruct a chronicler's own biography from his writings on others (John Gillingham on Roger of Howden)? What explains the absence of biographies of the early Plantagenet kings (1154–1272), when their Capetian contemporaries were well recorded, and is the contrast significant (Nicholas Vincent, "The Strange Case of the Missing Biographies")? How far is it possible to find the individual inside the single or multiple roles which persons of status had to play (Pauline Stafford, "Writing the Biography of Eleventh-century Queens")? [End Page 387] Stafford concludes that medieval biography "is difficult, but both possible and important"; and she and her fellow-contributors amply demonstrate its possibilities. David Bates brings great depth and subtlety to his reassessment of the earliest narrative sources for the life of William the Conqueror (William of Poitiers, the 'D' version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmesbury), and leaves the reader waiting expectantly for the "new narrative and [the] new biography [that] will emerge" (140); Edmund King re-assesses the accuracy and value of the Gesta Stephani; David Crouch offers a probing study on the "History of William the Marshal"; and Lindy Grant provides a splendid essay on Geoffrey of Lèves, the bishop of Chartres who employed Arnulf, later the long-lived and exceptionally talented bishop of Lisieux, whose letters Frank Barlow edited in 1939. From Christopher Holdsworth there is a new (and more sympathetic) reading of Bernard of Clairvaux's Vitae; and Elizabeth Van Houts explores the influence of Flemish authors (the author of the Encomium Emmae, Drogo of Saint-Winnocksbergen, and Folcard and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin) on English biography in the eleventh century. Jane Martindale's insightful examination of the remarkable "autobiographies" of two powerful French nobles, William, count of Poitou and duke of Aquitaine (1071–1126), and Fulk le Réchin of Anjou (1043–1109), the one in Occitan verse and the other in Latin prose, is an exemplary demonstration of the way in which subtle analysis can force known texts to reveal more secrets. To interpret the written record, the historian must first understand its form and function, and establish the purpose and reliability of its author. This demands exceptional skill in the interpretation of the written sources, and requires not credulity, but an open-mindedness towards them. It is refreshing to read that Richard Abels had been persuaded away from his own preconceptions by giving the sources their due, rather than attempting to impose a provocative thesis upon them, all the while remembering their ambiguities ("Alfred and his Biographers" 73–75), and Marjorie Chibnall's conclusion that, "however reasonable it may be to speculate about the medical or psychological condition influencing the career of an individual, there is a point beyond which speculation should not go in the face of positive evidence," although she allows "controlled speculation" when that evidence has been mastered ("The Empress Matilda as a Subject for Biography" 194). At the same time, the biographer of a medieval person has to be in command of the full range of surviving materials—narrative, diplomatic, administrative, legal, and...

Writing Scientific Biography

Much writing on scientific biography focuses on the legitimacy and utility of this genre. In contrast, this essay discusses a variety of genre conventions and imperatives which continue to exert a powerful influence on the selection of biographical subjects, and to control the plot and structure of the ensuing biographies. These imperatives include the following: the plot templates of the Bildungsroman (the realistic novel of individual self-development), the life trajectories of Weberian ideal types, and the functional elements and personae of the folkloric tale of the “hero’s quest.” The essay discusses the nature and application of these genre conventions in some detail, with the conclusion that biography, however useful, exerts a powerfully distorting influence on the image of how most science gets done.

Dictionary of Basilian Biography; Lives of Members of the Congregation of Priests of Saint Basil from Its Origins in 1822 to 2002 (review)

Reviewed by: Dictionary of Basilian Biography: Lives of Members of the Congregation of Priests of Saint Basil from Its Origins in 1822 to 2002 Terence Fay (bio) P. Wallace Platt, editor. Dictionary of Basilian Biography: Lives of Members of the Congregation of Priests of Saint Basil from Its Origins in 1822 to 2002. Second EditionUniversity of Toronto Press. xxvii, 715. $125.00 Biographical dictionaries are useful tools for historians, social scientists, and students. Recognizing this need, Father Robert Scollard in 1969 published the first Dictionary of Basilian Biography: Lives of Members of the Congregation of Priests of Saint Basil from Its Beginnings in 1822 to 1968. Seven years later, Gaston Carrière published the three-volume Dictionnaire biographique des Oblats de Marie-Immaculatée(Éditions de l'Université d'Ottawa, 1976), and fifteen years after that the Canadian Institute of Jesuit Studies published the Dictionary of Jesuit Biography: Ministry to English Canada, 1842–1987. The new edition of the Dictionary of Basilian Biographybrings up to date the competent and thorough work of the former editor, Father Scollard. In the second edition of the Dictionary of Basilian Biography,P. Wallace Platt [End Page 438]and his team weave together the threads of Basilian, Canadian, French, and mission history. They enjoyed the advantage of accounts of early members from French archival sources which the first edition did not have. They offer concise stories of healthy, ambitious, and talented Basilians who were educated to make a difference. The biographical subjects are persons of singular dedication to the cultural, educational, and pastoral well-being of the communities they served. Educated in both religious and secular learning, they carried with them their special skills of education, administration, athletics, music, drama, and art. Some candidates entered the Basilians after working in business or serving in the military. The entries are a microcosm of personal growth and development, disabilities and failures. The work Basilians shared involved them in an international world which touched the diverse populations of Canada, the United States, France, Algeria, Mexico, England, and Ireland. Of special interest to Canadian scholars are the university administrators, Henry Carr and Norbert Ruth; the hierarchs Archbishop Denis O'Connor and Cardinal George Flahiff; the well-published scholars, William Marceau and Walter Principe; the historians and educators, Laurence Shook and Michael Sheehan; the coaches, David Bauer in hockey and Jimmy Martin in baseball and football; the agricultural missionary in Africa, Gerry McGuigan; and the first Catholic priest to join the ccf, Eugene Cullinane. These entries include information, analysis, historical judgment, and a unique theme for each Basilian. The personal biographies make frequent references to the cultural and political history of countries in which the Basilians served. For instance, how the anti-religious measures of the Third French Republic affected individual Basilians is discussed. In Canada, the complexity of Catholic colleges being federated with provincial universities is explored in the entries on Henry Carr, John Teefy, and John Kelly. Conflicting views in the union of Assumption University with the University of Windsor are explored. Nicknames, anecdotes, and personal happenings are incorporated to make the text lively and the characters colourful. From the stories, one learns that Basilians do not retire but, when aging occurs, they are eased from positions of high responsibility to pastoral ministry and spiritual support to the aged. Personal struggles are included in these personal stories. One Basilian is said to have 'enjoyed saying Mass in Latin, even after the liturgical changes inaugurated by Vatican ii,' and another's 'long periods of depression and personal suffering' are sensitively revealed in the volume. Religious politics are also allowed to surface – for example, when the Basilians resisted Bishop Fallon's earnest desire that they move their college from Windsor to London, or when Archbishop Lynch rebuffed Michael Ferguson over the latter's request that he dampen down the anti-English attitudes of the Toronto clergy. [End Page 440] The second edition of the Basilian Dictionary is enriched with new and updated entries which are injected with drama and life. As one reads through the articles, one becomes acquainted with a great number of exceptional individuals who share a common intellectual and spiritual commitment. This biographical dictionary reveals...

A methodology for researching international entrepreneurship in SMEs

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to evaluate an alternative methodological approach to researching international entrepreneurship which mirrors the creativity of successful entrepreneurial organisations.Design/methodology/approachThe biographical approach discussed overcomes the pervasive linear thinking found in the wider management discipline. Successful entrepreneurial practice is anything but linear. This notion is embraced in the consideration of a methodology which mirrors its non‐linear path.FindingsA biographical approach constructs richer and deeper data which would otherwise remain undiscovered. It allows for a more flexible approach to research. Triangulation with the more usual methods of survey work and in‐depth interview ensures that quality and rigour are maintained throughout.Research limitations/implicationsResearch which adopts a more considered, critical perspective is limited in international entrepreneurship. There is evidence that critical entrepreneurship researchers are embracing alternative methodologies such as narrative, discursive and literary approaches which complement and challenge existing dominant thinking.Practical implicationsUp to now, many practitioners have felt that researchers do not listen sufficiently to their stories of success and failure and that there is a lack of meaningful engagement with them. The approach discussed here helps to improve the relationship between researcher and researched.Originality/valueFollowing more creative approaches such as those espoused in this paper, can help to facilitate more meaningful interaction between the researcher and the biographical subject.

Defoe as a Biographical Subject

AbstractThis essay on writing a biography of Daniel Defoe is focused on two problems. How is biography possible in a time when many thinkers have argued that all history and biography are essentially forms of fiction and that the notion of a unified personality is an illusion? And how does one deal with the contention of John Richetti and others that a biography of Daniel Defoe has to be different from other biographies in that his character is essentially irretrievable from the past? The arguments of various critics on authorship have shown us that works of history and biography are never scientific presentations but rather works shaped by their authors. But it is only through such limited viewpoints that facts of a life or a history can have meaning. Defoe was a spy who took many identities, but placed in a determinable historical context, his opinions and motives are fairly consistent. As the many biographers of Defoe before me and I have shown, shaping the life and character of such a protean figure is challenging but is not as difficult as might be thought.

Questioning the Subject in Biographical Interviewing

This paper considers how different approaches to interviewing and styles of questioning produce different sorts of biographical subjects and accounts. It compares styles of biographical interview (chronological and narrative) and types of question (narrative and explanatory), and presents an approach, which treats the interview as a collaborative co-production primarily concerned with the present and subjectivity, rather than the past and fact. It also considers how biographical interviewing may direct and contain narratives of the self through the subject positions it creates and offers interviewees. Discussion is grounded in reflection on a recent project involving university students in interviewing young people leaving care about their care experiences and making a training video for professionals. The paper highlights the inter-subjective and emotional aspects of interviewing in this context.

The Public Life of Painting

American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting. By Steven Biel. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. 215 pages. $21.95 (cloth). To explain what he means by the "the biography of things," the anthropologist Igor Kopytoff points to a typical Zulu hut, metamorphosing from its life as a house to its life as a guest house, as a kitchen, and finally as a chicken coop, before collapsing, ravaged by termites. Monumental objects become biographical subjects more readily. The year after Andy Warhol turned a building into a movie star (in the eight-hour Empire), Alan Trachtenberg published Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (1965), a path-breaking example of the biographical genre that includes Marvin Trachtenberg's The Statue of Liberty (1976), for instance, and Eric Darton's Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York City's World Trade Center (2000). These are biographies that tell the history of both physical and metaphysical (symbolic, allegorical, ideological) lives.1 Kopytoff also points to the example of artworks, explaining that "a biography of a painting by Renoir that ends up in an incinerator is as tragic, in its way, as the biography of a person who ends up murdered."2 Picasso's Guernica has inspired a record number of biographies, recently and importantly Gijs van Hensbergen's Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon (2004).3 However complex the history of the mural's composition and exhibition, the history of its iconicity resolves into the simple fact of its worldwide symbolic value: the protest against unwarranted military violence. Guernica might be understood not simply as the twentieth century's most iconic painting, but as the one painting that the century could hardly live without, an image reproduced as a tapestry to hang outside the U.N. Security Council. In this century, it has already become an icon that proves somewhat difficult to live with. On the day (in February 2003) when Colin Powell explained to the Security Council why the United States must wage war on Iraq, blue drapery veiled the dramatic reminder of the human capacity to inflict chaos and suffering. Humbler, comparatively diminutive paintings deserve biographies too, as Steven Biel demonstrates in his charming, lively American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting. I think it's debatable whether (from a non-American [End Page 485] perspective) Grant Wood's portrait is America's most famous painting. But for Americans, it is no doubt the most recognizable painting that is recognizably American, and recognizable not just as a portrait of two Americans, but also, it seems, as a portrait of America. As Wanda Corn put it, in the catalog that accompanied the retrospective (1983–84) that reestablished Wood's importance, few people agreed about what American Gothic was supposed to be saying, but "everyone agreed" that "the painting said something fundamentally American."4 For part of the art world, silence would have preferable. In the catalog, Corn quotes Hilton Kramer's confident 1974 dismissal of Wood as a "corpse" one need not "disinter."5 In response to the exhibition, Kramer strained to exorcise this return of the dead, describing Wood's oeuvre as "a calculated lie from start to finish—the fantasy of an emotionally retarded, adolescent sensibility desperately seeking refuge from the realities of life in a dreamworld of his own invention."6 The invective updated the "Grant Wood Controversy," as it was already called in 1942, the year of the memorial Wood retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago.7 On the one hand, it's easy enough to accept the controversy as part of the "system of art" that sustains itself by drawing and redrawing boundaries (between good and bad, inside and out, legitimate and illegitimate, art and not art);8 on the other, the stakes of the controversy extend beyond that system. Indeed, having turned its back on modernist aesthetics, Regionalism has never been granted anything like aesthetic autonomy; this is art that is supposed to perform representational, historical, ideological work...

Ethics and the Biographical Artifact: Doing Biography in the Academy Today

Ethics and the Biographical Artifact:Doing Biography in the Academy Today Christine Wiesenthal (bio) These days, biographical "artifacts" in the most mundane sense of the phrase have come sharply, even painfully, into focus for me. This is simply to confess that, at the end of several years of researching and writing my recent biography, The Half-Lives of Pat Lowther, I have yet to confront the truly terrible job of cleaning up my study, which is still cluttered to overflowing with all of those "things"—those physical remnants and records—that we tend to collect in the process of attempting to "reconstruct" a "life." It's a mess that calls to mind Mary Shelley's "filthy workshop of creation." And as I've been tripping over the accordion files, maps, photographs, and so forth that litter my study floor, I've also been grappling with the question of what to do with all of this material now that the book is done: now that the work is, in deed, a "fact"—"a thing done." As opposed to a "fact," "a thing done," artifact of course connotes instead "a thing made"—"an artificial product" of "human art and worksmanship."1 Interestingly, the oed records the first usage of the word by the British poet Coleridge, who in 1821 deployed it in a long and loving epistolary disquisition on the "ideal qualities and properties" of a good [End Page 63] inkstand. Long associated, then, with implements specific to "the art of writing," the term artifact is also useful in relation to the genre of nonfiction—specifically, in relation to the epistemological ambiguity that all nonfiction writing trades in, as the forging of some form of experience into literary truth, or even fact-based prose.2 It is, clearly, in this epistemological ambiguity—in its exploitation or acknowledgement—that ethics also enters the picture. For if the line between outright artifice and the slippery nature of nonfictional "truth" is any clearer for biographers than it is for, say, memoirists or poets, it nevertheless remains true that the biographical subject, or "I," too, is fortified on the one hand by "art" and on the other by "fact," just like the letter "i" literally encased in the middle of the word "art-i-fact."3 In isolating the biographical artifact for particular attention, my focus here falls first on questions of what might be called the ethics of narrative form: on when and how biography might seek to acknowledge (or indulge) its status as an artifactual alloy of experience, memory, and "facts"; and on the problem of the tension between the constructed and subjective nature of biographical "truth," on the one hand, and an awareness of life stories that seem to demand, especially on ethical and political grounds, a firm insistence on their non-fictionality, on their historical actuality as "things done"—however complicated those claims might be. Such questions of narrative form, however, also emerge from a more comprehensive process of biographical research that is, I want to suggest, already ethically complicated because it invariably relies on an inductive or emergent methodology that is essentially context-specific and responsive in nature. For biographers working within the academy, moreover, this research process has, in recent years, also become newly complicated [End Page 64] in terms of how it is played out in our larger institutional contexts. Here, I am referring specifically to forms of administrative oversight and regulation created in the wake of the Tri-Council's Policy Statement on Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans, implemented in 1998. I'd like to make space at the end of this discussion to consider some of the "far-reaching" and "standard setting" implications of this still-"evolving" Tri-Council policy document, which governs all post-secondary research involving living subjects, including work in the Humanities and Fine Arts (PRE, Refinements 2). I do so because the problems posed by this policy document, especially for researchers/creators in the Humanities and Fine Arts, should, I think, concern all of us—regardless of whether or not we write biographies or pursue "research involving humans." In what follows, then, I begin with the issue of biographical form as but...

Scientific Biography: History of Science by Another Means?

Biography is one of the most popular categories of books—and indeed the most popular category among nonfiction books, according to one British poll. Thus, biography offers historians of science an opportunity to reach a potentially broad audience. This essay examines approaches typical of different genres of scientific biography, including historians’ motivations in their choices of biographical subject and their decisions about strategies for reconstruction of the biographical life. While historians of science often use biography as a vehicle to analyze scientific processes and scientific culture, the most compelling scientific biographies are ones that portray the ambitions, passions, disappointments, and moral choices that characterize a scientist’s life.

The Making of John James Audubon

In an 1830 letter to Philadelphia naturalist Richard Harlan, John James Audubon lamented how little Americans appreciated his ornithological work. A passage from this letter supports and also complicates efforts to claim Audubon as an American phenomenon: Where are our Washingtons, Franklins ... nay, even Jeffersons? 'No taste in America.' That is severe judgment indeed-and yet what can we say to the contrary. For my part, was I not an American I might wish to belong to any other portion of the Globe. But America and my Enthusiasm go together, and I hope for brighter hours to come.1 Jaded, perhaps, by years of indifference, Audubon admits of no particular attachment to his adopted country. He could just as soon live anywhere else. And yet, as he concedes, his vocational calling, or enthusiasm, has been inseparable from the American scene. His masterpiece, The Birds of America, was born in its wilds, and the spirit of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson-the gauge by which his disappointments are judged-presided over his artistic coming of age. Audubon admired the Founders for their daring and inventiveness, even if he sometimes felt exasperated with the nation they left behind. This complex American status is central to these three biographies of Audubon. All emphasize that The Birds ofAmerica was in many ways an English book, and yet all situate the hunter, naturalist, and illustrator in an American narrative of immigration, exploration, self-making, and entrepreneurship. This maneuver takes its cues from the biographical subject himself. Audubon claimed to have followed Franklin's maxims since childhood and in low moments consoled himself with thoughts of a young ragtag Franklin eating his puffy roll in the streets of Philadelphia. In ways that hint of Alexander Hamilton, Audubon was born in the

Author and Hero -- Rereading Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist

Part of the original motivation that provoked my biography of Gregory Bateson Lipset 1980) was to arrive at an understanding of the course of his odd career and thinking in terms of his family background. In celebration of his 100th birthday, rereading it for the first time in twenty-five years, I find that my perspective of at least one dimension of this problem has changed somewhat. My earlier interpretation of the relationship between Gregory Bateson's life and thought was guided by an implicit kind of psychodynamic suggestion. That is, I viewed the text as informed by identity-shaping experiences that had taken place amid relationships in the family of orientation. My current view, as I say, does not start with the relationship of text to kinship. By rereading the Bateson family tragedy in terms of the social and moral implications of aesthetic consumption, I think that different, but significant, dimensions of it can be gleaned. It can be elucidated, I want to say, by focusing attention on the distinctions actors made and attitudes they held, distinctions and attitudes I now want to contrive as tactics in service of the goal of sustaining class status. In doing so, of course, I follow Bourdieu (1984). However, instead of stressing the direct assertion of class superiority through aesthetic taste as did Bourdieu, my purpose in this essay is to develop a theme of status ambivalence, as I now see it partially exposed in the outcroppings of my earlier account of the Bateson family, and then relate it to the subsequent career of its lastborn son. In conclusion, I comment briefly on the abiding, yet changing, relationship between myself and my biographical subject. Upward Mobility It is a truism that the Industrial Revolution was one of the great periods of capital accumulation in English history. And, the origins of the Bateson family assets go right to its most productive moment, the middle of the 18th century when the apical ancestor, the paternal great grandfather, Richard Bateson, made his fortune as a cotton merchant in Liverpool. To claim identity for his lineage among families that owned them already, he purchased armorial bearings in 1809, complete with bat wings. In other words, although the Bateson family moved into the commercial classes during this volatile time, they remained marginal to the landed gentry, like Darwins, Huxleys or Keynes, with whom they would later become involved. Their rise continued. The fifth born son of Richard Bateson, the cotton merchant, was William Henry (1812-1882), who became Master of St. John's College, Cambridge. St. John's was a center of [t]he spirit of the Liberal rentiers...whereas that of the Conservative...[landed aristocracy] was centered in Trinity (Crowther 1952:256). William Henry Bateson, as arriviste, led modernizing forces at Cambridge University, in the midst of the famous cosmological and political controversies between the authority of religious and scientific explanation that followed the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). The period of reform at St. John's (1857-82) became known as the 'age of Bateson' such was the extent of his influence over the college (Miller 1961). The Master opposed religious oaths for the professoriate, established new curricula in the sciences and improved teaching. As a result of his leadership, sons of nonlanded professionals, like himself, came to outnumber those of clergymen for the first time and graduates began to take employment outside of the Church of England. As a result of his own success, Bateson was allowed to marry and did so in 1858 to a woman who belonged to his own economic class, Anna Aiken (1829-1918). Her father, a Scot, was a prosperous Liverpool shipping merchant and her mother, an American, also hailed from a successful family. They had six children, beginning in 1860, four daughters and two sons. The family was atheist and liberal. They attended church for appearances not from conviction. …

Stories about the Birth of Modern Science

Both Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton contributed greatly to the early Royal Society of London. Their exchange of letters during the 1670s played a part in Newton's formulation of the universal law of gravity. So it is not unusual to speak of them in the same breath. But the affinities between Aughton's and Jardine's subjects do not end there. Both authors are writing histories of the 'scientific revolution' for non-specialists. Since Dava Sobel's hugelysuccessful account of the development of accurate instruments to measure longitude,1 we have seen many well-written biographies of early modern thinkers, which have also served as introductions to early modern science. Driven by the increasing popularity of this genre, publishers have commissioned writers to develop stories that can be easily digested by readers unfamiliar with the history of natural philosophy. To attract and satisfy this market, writers have reverted to a technique that simplifies the intellectual, political, and cultural concerns of their biographical subjects presenting them as so-called 'fathers of modern science'. Jardine's and Aughton's works sit comfortably in this genre. In his Prologue, Aughton expresses his hope that, by understanding Newton's genius, he can discover the roots of modern knowledge: 'There are times,' Aughton declares, 'when we must

The Paradox of Effeminized Masculinity and the Crisis of Authorship

Making a spectacle out of oneself seemed a specifically feminine danger. The danger was of an exposure. Men, I learned somewhat later in life, exposed themselves, but that operation was quite deliberate and circumscribed. For a woman, making a spectacle out of herself had more do with a kind of inadvertency and loss of boundaries. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque O come (a voice seems say) Fly that form--come sisters! come away. Come, from those livid withdraw your gaze, Those which Virtue views in mute amaze; Nor deem, that Genius lends a veil, hide The dire apostate, the fell suicide. Richard Polwhele, The Unsex'd Females Godwin's Memoirs of Wollstonecraft Throughout his 1798 anti-feminist satire, The Unsex'd Females, Richard Polwhele constructs a clear dichotomy between a female authorial subject whose literary activities do not compromise the operation of a femininity to NATURE (11) and the unsex'd female author whose literary pursuits render her monstrous, deviant, and, above all, unnatural. Although Polwhele attacks (and simultaneously constructs) the generic category of the unsex'd female author throughout his poem, he reserves his most virulent satire for Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the radical 1790 text, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, and its feminist counterpart of two years later, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Presenting her as the intrepid champion of her sex (13) and as leader of her band of unsex'd female followers, Polwhele represents Wollstonecraft as a pathological aberration, a vision of bodily disease and moral sickness that threatens the healthy state of femininity best embodied by the seraphic Hannah More (28). My second epigraph stages the climax of this confrontation, as More, a vision of grace and happiness, recalls her unsex'd sisters from the pale and lived limbs of a morally and physically sick Wollstonecraft (28). While Polwhele's poem serves as a significant document pathologizing the unnatural authorial body of Wollstonecraft, it takes perhaps its most compelling form as an intertext another 1798 publication also invested in constructing a public face for the recently deceased author. William Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in an attempt give the public some account of the life of a person of eminent merit deceased, an attempt meant counter and defuse the thoughtless calumny and malignant misrepresentation that had dogged his wife in the final years of her life (43). On one level, the intention of the Memoirs is clear: in constructing Wollstonecraft as a heroine of sensibility, a woman of acute who is both sensitive the inequalities of gender and class and determined address them through reasoned argument, Godwin attempts recuperate Wollstonecraft's personal reputation and preserve, for posterity, her authorial persona. It is in this sense that Mitzi Myers reads the text as an idealized labour of love (303)--a sympathetic narrative of an early feminist icon structured around the literary conventions of the eighteenth-century novel of sensibility. As Myers recognizes, however, such a narrative is anything but objective, and, for Myers, the text is so infused with Godwin's personal introspection that it becomes his own autobiography of intellectual and emotional development (300). Despite the balance suggested by this parallel narrative structure, there are significant moments in the Memoirs where the text elides its own biographical subject in favour of what Mary Jacobus sees as its true narrative--that of Godwin's conversion into a of feeling (278). What remains be explored, however, is the extent which this construction of himself as a man of feeling furthers Godwin's more general articulation of his own authorial identity within the public space of a proliferating and shifting print culture. …