Biographical Writings Research Articles

Frank Capra and Elia Kazan, American outsiders

Frank Capra and Elia Kazan both came to the United States as children. From immigrant stock, each experienced the effects of being looked down upon as outsiders to Anglo culture. Based on the two men’s autobiographical accounts, together with their films and biographical writings about them, this article examines the routes by which they sought entry into the dominant culture. This process would require the rejection, in each case, of part of his family heritage. It would lead to very different attitudes to ethnicity in their films: Kazan demonstrated interest in the subject, whereas Capra largely suppressed it. The article underlines other “covert dialogues” in the films directed by the two men. It shows that they most diverged over issues of sexuality and the later rediscovery of their ethnic roots.

Tibetan Buddhist Embodiment: The Religious Bodies of a Deceased Lama

When bodies are conceived as permeable fields our physical forms become inseparable from each other and the world from which they manifest. The extension of one’s subjectivity to include cosmological divinities emphasizes the many other bodies which, in some cultural contexts, may overlap and unite with the world. In this article I explore how narratives of a Tibetan Buddhist high-lama’s death and trajectory of lives contain complex formulations of Tibetan theories of embodiment. An ethnographic attendance to biographical writings and teachings at the time of his funerary ceremonies reveals not only how trikaya, or the notion of three bodies, coheres in Tibetan conceptual frameworks, but also how the articulation of these bodies affects new ways to intersubjectively engage with the deceased.

Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market (review)

Reviewed by: Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market Lyn Pykett (bio) Linda H. Peterson . Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. 308 pp. ISBN 978-0691140179, $35.00. Towards the end of the eighteenth century a change occurred, so Virginia Woolf asserted in Chapter Four of A Room of One's Own, that was more important than the War of the Roses: middle-class women began to write for money. Woolf claimed that it was this "solid fact that women could make money by writing" that underpinned "the extreme activity of mind" among women in the late eighteenth century. It also enabled them to be taken seriously, for "money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for." In fact, because writing remained an insecure source of income with relatively low rates of pay for at least the first half of the nineteenth century, it was difficult for either men or women to earn a living solely from their pen. Moreover, for much of the nineteenth century both male writers and female writers alike were engaged in a struggle to gain recognition for writing or the pursuit of literature as a profession on a par with the practice of law or medicine. This is the context for Linda Peterson's fascinating exploration of the continuing but by no means smooth development of women's professional authorship during the nineteenth century. Unsurprisingly, Peterson links the flowering of women's literary professionalism to both the development of new genres and the opening up of established genres, which accompanied the rapid expansion of print culture in the nineteenth century. Women increasingly entered the literary marketplace and the profession of letters as writers for periodicals, often under the cover of the anonymity that was the norm for periodical authors until after mid-century. The originality of this important contribution to the history of authorship in Victorian Britain lies in its [End Page 374] demonstration of how, throughout the nineteenth century, women writers self-consciously constructed specific authorial identities for themselves in relation to particular myths or discourses of authorship. Peterson organizes her study around three key moments in the development of discourses of professional authorship: the rise of the periodical press and the move towards more adequate payment for writing in the 1830s; the mid-century campaign for copyright and the attempts of both male and female writers to define their contribution to the nation; and the renewed drive for professional recognition in the 1880s and 1890s at the time of the establishment of the Society of Authors. A lengthy and richly informative first chapter gives an overview of the nineteenth-century history of the profession of letters, and then, perhaps more importantly for readers of this journal, Peterson moves to a case study approach based on the biographies of, biographical writings about, and autobiographical writings by, six nineteenth-century women authors. These case studies focus on women whose literary innovations and public self-constructions as writers (or, in some cases, their public construction by others) are seen by Peterson as pivotal in the history of authorship. Some of the case studies focus on writers whose professional success outlived them, others on those who simply enjoyed professional success in their own day. The case studies begin with Harriet Martineau, a central figure in the book and, Peterson suggests, perhaps the most prominent woman of letters of the nineteenth century. Martineau's autobiography and letters, in which she presents herself as emerging from a long apprenticeship as a solitary and pioneering authoress, are reread alongside a reexamination of the trajectory of her career to show how she progressed from a fairly conventional "feminine" beginning writing devotional literature, didactic tracts, and essays and tales on religious and moral subjects, to reinvent herself as a public commentator on the leading matters of the day-who by 1858 (as Valerie Sanders has shown) was informing the editor of the Edinburgh Review that "I'm your man" to write an article on the repatriation of slave laborers to Liberia, and by 1859 was expressing the hope that he would find that she...

Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira e a formação do pensamento social na Amazônia

O presente trabalho estabelece o tratamento de conceitos-chave e termos relevantes para a compreensão da expedição filosófica chefiada por Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira no século XVIII. Tem o propósito de mostrar ao leitor um pouco da biografia do autor. Propõe uma reflexão antropológica sobre os povos da América descobertos durante a viagem que durou quase dez anos. A análise aponta para a relação comparativa entre os povos do Novo Mundo e os do velho continente, destacando o choque cultural entre eles como aspecto relevante para o desmoronamento do eurocentrismo. O trabalho pretende, em especial, demonstrar a contribuição de Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira para a formação do pensamento social da Amazônia.

Review

Reviewed by: New Women Dramatists in America, 1890-1920 Brenda Murphy New Women Dramatists in America, 1890–1920. By Sherry D. Engle. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. x + 276 pp. $79.95. This study of American women dramatists of the Progressive Era focuses on five playwrights "who rose in prominence as professional dramatists at the turn of the century and who have been essentially overlooked by theatre scholars, their legacy to American theatre overshadowed by 'canonized' male writers of the period" (1). The playwrights that Sherry Engle recovers are Martha Morton, Madeleine Lucette Ryley, Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland, Beulah Marie Dix, and Rida Johnson Young, all of whom were recognized as successful playwrights, both critically and financially, during the period but who have been passed over by theater historians and critics since the early 1920 s. Engle has employed extensive research in bringing these playwrights to light, making use of archival and public documents, correspondence and interviews, articles, and reviews from many contemporary sources. In each chapter, she devotes a section to a single writer's biography (or in the case of collaborators Sutherland and Dix, two writers' biographies), her writing process, and her "evolution as a dramatist" (2). The rest of each chapter is devoted to a summary of the writer's major plays and their critical reception. Engle also includes major documents that help flesh out the portrait of the playwright, such as Martha Morton's speech to the members of the male-only American Dramatists Club in 1907. In addition, a concise and informative introduction places the playwrights in the context of Progressive Era theater conditions and the economic and cultural conditions of the country under which they pursued their careers in the theater. This book is richly informative, and reading through all four chapters at once gives a broad sense of the playwriting that succeeded in the Broadway theatre during the period. While all of the playwrights were commercially successful, each carved out a different piece of the theatrical landscape. As Engle demonstrates, Morton was at her best with "light, romantic comedies using clear-cut, wholesome themes that affirm basic American values" (46). Ryley [End Page 225] excelled at domestic or sentimental comedy. Dix and Sutherland contributed a particular blend of comedy and fantasy with precise knowledge in their historical dramas, and Dix was also capable of serious contemporary commentary, such as her antiwar play Moloch. Young was most successful as a lyricist and collaborator on musical comedies and operettas like the classic Naughty Marietta. While more of her original analysis of the plays would be welcome, Engle provides a full and useful historical context through her summaries and generous citations of contemporary reviews of the plays. It clearly was not easy to reconstruct the lives and careers of these playwrights, but Engle's thorough research yields an interesting and significant account of each. She also has produced a most useful resource for future research into the women playwrights of this period. Particularly noteworthy is the appendix, a list of "New York Plays and Musicals by Women, April 1885–June 1925." This lengthy list demonstrates the extent to which women were writing for the theatre during the period and immediately suggests topics for future study. It should be noted that Engle for the most part includes only plays that were produced for the Broadway or commercial theatre rather than those produced for the influential "little theatre" groups, such as the Provincetown Players and the Washington Square Players, which have already received a good deal of critical attention. Reading through the list also evokes some questions about Engle's own choices in undertaking her research. She explains in a note that she does not discuss the best-known and most commercially successful woman playwright of the period, Rachel Crothers, because she has already received some critical attention; Engle's purpose is to recover playwrights who have been neglected. But the absence of some other playwrights, such as the very popular Frances Hodgson Burnett, the suffragist and actor Elizabeth Robins, and Mary Roberts Rinehart, Clare Kummer, and Zoe Akins, raises intriguing questions. Why are they not considered in the volume? What is it about the five playwrights included that...

P03-284 - Self-immolation of the soviet opponents in central Europe : suicidal behaviour or political protest?

IntroductionAround thirty of cases of public self-immolation occurred in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Lithuania between 1968 and 1972 in the background of protest movement against the Soviet ledinvasion. Rather than an act of a political protest, in a moment of absurdity of the existence, or a rational solution aimed to finish a desperate life situation, could a self-immolation also testify a suicidal behaviour and a failure of adaptation mechanisms of the victims concomitant a mental disorder?MethodWe have selected and studied four most mediated cases of this period. Press articles available in English, French and Czech, biographical writings and czech archived data concerning Palach J. R. Kalanta, J. Zajic and R. Siwiec allowed us to retrospectively analyse the circumstances of the acting out, their apparent or hidden motivations and identify their suicidal risk factors.ResultsAll the four victims were men, young single students, aged between 18 and 21 years, excepted from R. Siwiec, aged 60 years. None had a psychiatric history or abuse of alcohol. All four, in the opposition of the communist system, were surrounded by a supporting family background. The public character of their act highlights the opposition against a totalitarian system and is questionning the possible intentionality of their behavior or the identification process of the young adults in post-adolescence.ConclusionImmolation by fire of Soviet opponents in Central Europe should be revised in the light of the likely depression and narcissistic vulnerabilities of these subjects.

Keynes as Biographer and Obituarist

In John Maynard Keynes’s Collected Writings there are forty-five biographical essays, sixteen of which are obituaries from the Economic Journal. The obituaries in the Economic Journal were very important to Keynes. The Collected Writings attempt ‘to publish a complete record of Keynes’s serious writing as an economist’ and in Essays in Biography ‘to include not only his major but also his minor writings both about economists and his friends in King’s’. In this paper, however, it is argued that not all of Keynes’s biographical writings are included in his Collected Writings. There may be over ten additional obituaries authored by Keynes that are not included in the Collected Writings version of Essays in Biography. Two of these are definitely attributable to Keynes, one of which is half of Ramsey’s obituary in The Times. During Keynes’s editorship of the Economic Journal there were fourteen anonymous obituaries in the Economic Journal. It is argued that almost all of these were authored by Keynes. In addition to the obituaries in the Economic Journal, there were announcements of death. It is argued that most, if not all, of the announcements of death in the Economic Journal during Keynes’s editorship were also written by him.

Biography Fundamentals: Methodological Considerations about Biographical Writing

زندگی‌نامه به منزله‌ی پردازش جنبه‌هایی از زندگی یک شخصیت، امروزه یکی از حوزه‌های مهم و پرکاربرد تاریخ است. با عنایت به سبک‌ها و روش‌های متفاوتی که در دنیا برای نوشتن زندگی‌نامه‌ها به کار می‌روند، این پرسش مطرح است که در سرگذشت‌نگاری باید از چه قواعد و اصولی پیروی کرد و به چه نوع الزام‌های معرفت‌شناسانه وفادار ماند؟ این مقاله ضمن پاسخ‌گفتن به این مسئله، می‌کوشد با دسته‌بندی برخی از انواع زندگی‌نامه‌ها، درباره‌ی اهمیت زندگی‌نامه نویسی گفت‌وگو کند؛ از دانش‌های لازم برای زندگی نامه‌نویسی، منابع زندگی‌نامه نگاری، نقد زندگی‌نامه‌ها، روش‌های پژوهش در سرگذشت‌نگاری، عینیت در زندگی‌نامه‌نویسی و نیز برخی دیگر از ابعاد معرفت‌شناسانه‌ی آن سخن براند.

Literaturnaia zhizn' Rossii 1920-kh godov. Sobytiia. Otzyvy sovremennikov. Bibliografiia. Tom 1. Chast' 1. Moskva i Petrograd 1917-1920 gg by A. Iu Galushkin Literaturnaia zhizn' Rossii 1920-kh godov. Sobytiia. Otzyvy sovremennikov. Bibliografiia. Tom 1. Chast' 2. Moskva i Petrograd 1921-1922 gg by A. Iu Galushkin (review)

reviews 739 oftheir father; he hasjustwitnessed Mitia'sviolent attack on Fedor,histhreat to 'come back and killhim',and Ivan's hate-filled outburst: Viperwilleat viper'.Fedor'stelling Aleshato takehismother's iconis a recognition ofthe holy,fearful and subliminal to be sure,and thusan act ofexpiation (p. 199). The narrator's remarkthatAlesha's presencehad 'affected[Fedor] even morally', thatchehad awakenedsomething thathad longbeen stifled in his soul' shouldbe takenseriously. Alesha's 'Gana experience'depictsrather morethan'something', than'a senseof divineabundance'(pp.212,10).It culminates withhis voice: 'Someone [Kto-to] visitedmysoul at thathour', wherekto-to designates an unnamedbutdefinite person. Williamsengageswithmanyinterpreters' views.Some have, inevitably, been overlooked, particularly thoseofJostein Bortnes who,through hisfine analysesof the aestheticstructures deployedin Dostoevskii'sfiction, has arrivedat many of Williams'sinsights. Williamswritessuperbly,every sentence counts, he can express justwhathe wantsto saywitheloquentprecisionand conviction. Not onlythoseinterested in Dostoevskii's Christianity willfindmuchenrichment fortheirthoughts but,givenitscentrality to his fiction, thisbook will be indispensable foranyone seriously interested in Dostoevskii. Williamshas gone verydeeplyintoDostoevskii's art and has illuminated, as fewhave,itsChristocentric heart. Department ofSlavonic Studies Diane OenningThompson University ofCambridge Galushkin, A. Iu. (ed.).Literaturnaia zhizyi ' Rossiiig20-kh godov. Sobytiia. Otzyvy sovremennikov. Bibliograftia. Tom1. Chast'1. Moskva i Petrograd igij-ig20 gg. Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk.Institut mir ovoiliteratury im.A. M. Gor'kogo RAN, Moscow, 2005. 767 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Indexes. Price unknown. Galushkin, A. Iu. (ed.).Literaturnaia zhizn ' Rossiiig20-kh godov. Sobytiia. Otzyvy sovremennikov. Bibliografiia. Tom1. Chast'2. Moskva i Petrograd iQ2i-ig22gg. Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk.Institut mir ovoiliteratury im.A. M. Gor'kogo RAN, Moscow, 2005. 704 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Indexes. Price unknown. The two books underreviewcomprisethe first volumesof an extremely ambitiousenterprise whichundertakes to chronicleday by day, year by yearthelifeoftheRussian-language literary community in Russiafromthe OctoberRevolution through to theend ofthe1920s.'Russia' hereis understoodas also encompassing thosepartsoftheold tsarist empirewhichcame underWhiteor foreign administration duringtheCivilWar and theAllied intervention, but not the Russianémigrécommunity elsewhere in Europe. The focusis noton authorsor on literary worksas such,but on thesocial matrixsurrounding theirlivesas writers and theproduction oftheirworks (publishing houses,critical reception, journals,newspapers, literary organizations ,literary evenings and disputes, competitions, censorship, relations with stateand Partyinstitutions, etc.).Volumes2 and 3 willdo thesame forthe 740 SEER, 87, 4, OCTOBER 200g periods1923-26and 1927-29respectively, whileVolumes4 and 5 willcover theliterary lifeoftheRussianregions overtheentire periodfrom 1917 to1929. Volume6 willcomprise comprehensive indexesfortheentire publication. It is also theeditors' intention tomaketheresults oftheenterprise availableon CD-Rom and on theinternet in theform ofa hypertext database. As the chiefeditor,A. I. Galushkin, writesin the long methodological introduction to be foundin Book 1 of the openingvolume(pp. 3-18),the periodfrom theBolshevik Revolution to theend ofthe1920swas formany yearsmore a fieldforideologicalopportunism thanforscientific analysis, one thatclearly revealswhathe callsthe'relativity and fluidity' ofthemethodologicalcriteria brought tobearuponit.Itwastocounteract thisperceived lack of objectivity in termsof literary and other Tacts' made available forscholarly analysisthatthepresentpublishing enterprise was conceived. Furthermore, theeditors wishedto avoidthemorepurely biographical focus ofthechronicle genrebasedon thelivesandworks ofindividual authors. On thecontrary, theywerein searchofwhatGalushkin calls 'supra-individual' criteria ofrelevance whendeciding whattoinclude, and whatnottoinclude, in theirannalsofRussianliterary life.Information concerning an individual writer's biography wouldbe includedchiefly to the extentthatit involved hisor herinteraction withotherwriters orwithwriters' organizations, newspapers ,publishing houses,government and statebodies.By thesame logic, publicationdetailsof workswhichdid not attractthe attention of fellow writers and newspaper andjournalreviewers wouldbe omitted, whileworks which did attractpublic notice would have numerousprintedreactions identified, regardless ofpossiblerepetition ofcontent, and so on. The emphasisof the presentchroniclefallsfirmly on contemporary, 'synchronous' documents, therefore journaland newspaper publications, published books,therecordsofliterary organizations, Partyand statedirectivesrelating to literary, publishing or censorship matters, as wellas relevant passagesfrom private diariesand correspondence betweenindividual writers and publishinghouses. Memoir material,by contrast,by virtueof its 'non-synchronous' naturehas generally not been included.In view of the chronicle'smethodological parameters, thisis perhapsunderstandable, as is thedecisionto excludeworksdevotedexclusively to literary history and literary theory, sinceinclusion would have opened the gatesto a veritable floodofmaterial, mostofitpursuing 'non-synchronous' goals.Lessjustifiable, perhaps,was the decisionto excludepublicationdetailsof pre-twentiethcentury classicRussianliterature, and also oftranslated literature. (Thiswill notbe theplacetorecover thepublication recordandreception ofthe'Vsemirnaialiteratura ' publishing house,forexample, whoseprogramme issignalled intheentry for13June1919.)Such cavilsapart,one mustapplaudthescope ofinterest and breadthofcoveragewhichcharacterize thepresent volumes. The chronicle as a wholeshouldbe an obligatory acquisition forall university libraries, as also forscholars researching theliterary lifeofRussiaduring thefirst twelve yearsofSovietrule. Department ofRussian R. J. Keys University ofStAndrews ...

Stefan Zweig Reconsidered: New Perspectives on his Literary and Biographical Writings (review)

Reviewed by: Stefan Zweig Reconsidered: New Perspectives on his Literary and Biographical Writings Steven R. Cerf Stefan Zweig Reconsidered: New Perspectives on his Literary and Biographical Writings, edited by Mark H. Gelber. Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 2007. 225 pp. €62.00. Mark H. Gelber is to be congratulated for editing this essay collection on Stefan Zweig’s relationship to his Judaism. Comprising revised papers from the International Zweig Conference held in Israel in 2004, this anthology, with fourteen contributions by European and Israeli scholars, sheds new light on Zweig’s life-long ambivalence towards his Jewish roots. Underscoring the international scope of the project, half of the articles are in English, five are in German, and two are in French. Informative footnotes and up-to-date bibliographies abound, and English translations from Zweig’s primary texts are presented along with German citations. In his introduction, Gelber sets the tone for the anthology by emphasizing the difference between the first Israeli Zweig conference twenty-three years before and this second convention; in 1981, distinguished elder Viennese born personalities, who had known Zweig or his family, had spoken with emotion about the writer. The 2004 conference, by contrast, was a research-sharing occasion for literary scholars to analyze Zweig’s erratic secular Jewish identity. Particularly significant are those contributions which deal with the Jewish characters in Zweig’s psychological novellas and those which analyze Zweig’s deeply personal stand towards his heritage as manifested in his public and private non-fiction. The two essays from the first cluster that should be singled out are Sarah Fraiman-Morris’ discussion of “Untergang eines Herzens” (“Destruction/Death of a Heart”) and Hanni Mittelmann’s treatment of androgyny in Zweig’s novellas, which she depicts in her title as “tales of the assimilationist Jewish predicament.” Fraiman-Morris’ analysis is based on Zweig’s affinity with Tolstoy. The Austrian’s early “Im Schnee” (“In the Snow”)—an account of an entire Jewish community’s flight from a pogrom and its dying in the snow—was inspired by Tolstoy’s “The Snowstorm.” The protagonist in Zweig’s mature “Heart” novella, Salomonsohn undergoes an inner journey from empty materialism to spiritual insight in the face of illness, in much the same manner as Tolstoy’s eponymous Ivan Illych. Throughout Zweig’s story, the existential aloneness of Salomonsohn parallels Ivan’s escapism and the worldly success of each protagonist stands in sharp contradistinction to his own final spiritual commitment. Whereas Tolstoy’s protagonist eventually feels closeness to his son and wife, Zweig’s protagonist is reunited with his sectarian community and God. Clearly, Zweig’s admiration for the traditional spirituality of the Eastern European [End Page 162] Jewish community comes across, as does the wisdom of the tellingly named son of Solomon. Mittelmann’s comparison of Bertold Berger in “Scharlach” (“Scarlet Fever”) and Edgar in “Brennendes Geheimnis” (“Burning Secret”) is revelatory. In Berger’s case, it his intellectual courage that transcends his feminized daily routine. In Edgar’s case, there is no outwardly redeeming act, and this protagonist’s infantilized behavior is congruent, just as Berger’s life is, with Otto Weininger’s critique of the Jewish male in his negativist, but highly influential, 1906 study of Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character). Mittelmann continues by discussing Zweig’s female protagonists, including Irene in “Angst” (“Fear”) who “display the feminine qualities of emotionality and sensitivity, of childlike vulnerability . . . which are linked by Weininger to the Jew” (p. 168). Mittelmann emphasizes that androgyny mends the rift between the desire to belong and the distance of the outsider, providing a humanistic alternative to the ideology of assimilationism. Matjaž Birk’s comparison of “Fear” with Schnitzler’s “Die Braut” (“The Bride”) not only reveals how dependent Zweig was on Schnitzler’s artistry, but complements Mittelmann’s treatment of the same Zweig text. Three essays on the non-fiction representation of Judaism comprise the anthology’s other most helpful portion. Robert S. Wistrich’s discussion of Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday pinpoints Zweig’s ambivalence towards Judaism. Zweig barely mentions the rampant antisemitism in turn-of-thecentury Vienna under the openly racist mayor Karl Lueger. Moreover, Zweig’s inability to discuss the...

The platform of time: memoirs of family and friends

Taking family, friends and servants as her subjects, Virginia Woolf here presents a series of impressions of the people around her. And as she describes their lives - including an in-depth piece on her nephew Julian Bell, and sketches on Bloomsbury figures Lady Ottoline Morrell and Lady Strachey - she also reveals much about her own attitudes - to the War, to her writing, and to education. The result is a fascinating and revealing work that will crucially augment what is currently available of her biographical writings.

Buddhist Narratives of the Great Debates

Western scholars have written on the theory of Buddhist argumentation. They have also analyzed examples of arguments found in philosophical and polemical writing. However, little has been written to date about what might have transpired when Buddhists and their opponents met in face-to-face debates in classical India. Drawing on Chinese and Tibetan historical and biographical writings about famous Indian debates, this essay analyzes the structure and conventions of these accounts as a literary form. While it is difficult to assess the historicity of particular narratives, an analysis of this literature as a

Proclamations and Silences: ‘Race’, Self-Fashioning and Sexuality in the Trans-Atlantic Correspondence between Langston Hughes and Richard Rive

The article draws on research for a larger project – a (literary) biography of writer, essayist and educationist Richard Rive (1930–1989). In this piece, the correspondence between Rive and Langston Hughes, as well as creative, critical and autobiographical works by Rive, provide the sources for an examination of ways in which the Cape-based writer forged a sense of self in the face of acute racial oppression, and how he left unspoken or deeply encoded his sense of his own homosexuality. Gilroy's notion of the creation of meaning through movement across the Atlantic proves useful to a point, but my argument is that Gilroy's ‘double consciousness’ is more applicable to black diaspora in the north than it is to a figure like Rive, who proves to be far more multivalent and contradictory in his self-fashioning as a non-racialist, a South African and both a black and cosmopolitan writer.

Closet and Cabinet: Clutter as Cosmology

ABSTRACTIn Central Slovakia, homes “grow” and get cluttered with age. Cabinets and closets are used to house this profusion of possessions. However, their very role as containers for precious and meaningful objects—such as expensive cut glass or family heirlooms—gives them a poetic and symbolic weight that belies their modest appearance. Based on anthropological fieldwork, this article investigates how practices of collection, storage, and display of particular genres of domestic objects create spaces of intimacy in the home that work to perpetuate a sense of family history amongst middle-aged Slovaks in and around the provincial town of Banská Bystrica. Inspired by the historiography of Walter Benjamin, as well as his biographical writings, the focus of the study lies on the relation between memory and material culture in the home. Rather than relying on narratives of consumption and aesthetic choice recently popular amongst anthropologists studying domestic decor, it forms an attempt to reengage with literature that looks to the home as a site for the poetic imagination in order to grasp sentiments that are rarely verbalized.

Ethics and Institutions in Biographical Writing on Indonesian Subjects

It has been argued that the social sciences in general are currently undergoing an ‘auto/biographical turn’. Internationally, the field remains largely Eurocentric and discussion of the particular problems presented by life writing in contexts such as Indonesia—in Asia more broadly—remains relatively rare. Nonetheless, within Indonesian studies, academic interest is increasing in the critical production, use, and interpretation of such materials, particularly in the context of the imagination and representation of an emerging ‘modern’ Indonesian identity. This paper examines ethical issues relating to such writing of Indonesian lives. It emerges from a concern over the ‘over-ethicizing’ and ‘over-institutionalising’ of non-medical life writing and examines the effects of prevailing regulations governing this activity in Australian universities. It then explores additional institutional constraints—sometimes directly contradicting Australia's national code of ethics—that might apply in the Indonesian context. It concludes with a discussion of the consequent challenges of attempting to write a biography of Indonesian author and journalist, Mochtar Lubis.1

:English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Survey

Although biography is one of today's most flourishing literary genres, its early history has attracted much less attention than that of other forms, a neglect that is especially apparent in the case of the formative period of English biography, the seventeenth century. This new work by Allan Pritchard fills the scholarly void by providing a wide-ranging and comprehensive survey of this period's biographical writings. After charting the growth of seventeenth-century biographical writing, Pritchard explores the ways in which traditional forms of religious biography and lives of princes and other secular figures were adapted to, and transformed by, the crises and revolutions of the period. He then considers the development of less traditional biographical types and analyzes the emergence of a 'new biography,' concerned essentially with individuality and with private as well as public life. Examining a rich range of texts, English Biography in the Seventeenth Century is a survey of a field important for both literary and wider cultural reasons.

William Osler's historical scholarship: a contradiction in terms?

For many it is difficult to grasp, let alone understand in any depth, the abundant nature of William Osler's (1849-1919) influence. Although knowing his name as a distinguished physician, few have more than a scant appreciation of his manifold contributions to medicine, and his example as the physician/historian and medical humanist par excellence. This essay considers Osler's scholarship as evidenced in his historical and biographical writings, and some lessons that we might learn from his endeavours.

Mary Shelley Studies: From “Author ofFrankenstein” to “the Great Work of Life”

AbstractThis essay traces developments in Mary Shelley studies, which arose in the late 1960s after a period of critical neglect. It looks backward to Victorian conceptions as they were promoted by her heirs to account for a view of Shelley as intellectually timid, a tendency to approach her writings through biographical perspectives, a conviction that her writings diminish in quality afterFrankenstein. If interest inFrankensteindating from the late 1960s served as a catalyst for study of her literary output, a proliferation of work on Shelley has been influenced by the much more recent appearance of scholarly and paperback editions of her writings. Critical trends in criticism of her fictions, biographical writings, travel literature, and editing are briefly surveyed, and the essay concludes with some tentative suggestions about possible directions. Above all, there is a need to continue to look beyondFrankensteinand to view Shelley’s self‐described “great work of life” from a more comprehensive perspective in which she is writing not merely as the wife of Percy Shelley or as the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, but in her own right.

The Wars of the Roses: The Soldiers' Experience

The Wars of the Roses: The Soldiers' Experience, by Anthony Goodman (Stroud: Tempus, 2005; pp. 288. £25). This, as the author acknowledges, is his second entry into the fray; Anthony Goodman published The Wars of the Roses: Military Activity and English Society, 1452–1497 in 1981. One strand of that book was an attempt to get at the realities of the wars, to see how they were actually experienced ‘on the ground’. That becomes ostensibly the theme of the present book. Paucity of direct evidence is, of course, the problem. Professor Goodman rightly makes much of the remarkable investigation of skeletons from the battlefield of Towton, published as Blood Red Roses, ed. V. Fiorato and others (2000) to make his point (a reversion to the traditional view, generally discounted in recent literature) about the availability of a pool of ‘professional’ soldiers, battle-hardened veterans. But a good deal of the discussion is actually about the experiences of the gentle classes, ‘officers’ rather than ‘rankers’, and evidence is not plentiful even there. (He suggests there was some reluctance to compile biographical writings, itself an interesting comment on the perceived difficulty of winning ‘honour’ in a civil war.) He ranges back and fore to set the wars in context, to the French wars, but also back to Stephen's reign, and forward to Tudor rebellions. Compared to the French wars he discovers a reluctance to engage in pillage, at least as far as civilian targets were concerned; corpses on the battlefield, however, were fair game. The chance of adventure (not least sexual), of escape from the everyday for a brief period, was, he suggests, a powerful recruiting agent; but this, though plausible, can only be speculation. The book seems rather bland, lacking discussion of evidential problems. The Lancastrian Prince of Wales is said to have been killed ‘in the battle’ or ‘in the rout’ at Tewkesbury; so much for the evidence that he may have been killed in cold blood after capture. The so-called ‘confession’ by Sir Hugh Conway of having been present at a discussion when assorted magnates discussed the succession to Henry VII, ‘but none of them spake of my lord prince’ (whether Arthur or Henry), is quoted at face value, without reference to the problems about its reliability pointed out by Dominic Luckett (‘Crown, Patronage and Political Morality’, ante, cx (1995), 578–95), and David Grummitt (‘“For the Surety of the Towne and Marches”’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, xliv (2000), 184–203). There are good illustrations, but the index is defective (no ‘Conway’, no ‘Calais’). The earlier book was less readable, but much meatier.

Paulo Leminski: sinais de vida e sobrevida

Esse ensaio tem como objetivo a leitura articulada de alguns aspectos das cartas, ensaios e biografias escritos por Paulo Leminski. Através dessa leitura, apresenta questões que permitam compreender, em função dos vínculos entre experiência de vida e de linguagem, sua opção por uma atividade intelectual híbrida, que questiona as fronteiras da cultura de seu tempo, bem como, em face dos limites desse tempo, sua idéia de contemporaneidade, assombrada pela sobrevida de personagens de outras épocas e relativizada por sua própria morte precoce.