Evelyn J. Hinz, ed., DATA and A C TA : Aspects of Life-Writing (Winnipeg: Mosaic, 1987). xii, 156. $20.95 cloth; $14.95 paper It is a measure of the degree to which critical discussion of life-writing has progressed in recent years that this collection of essays, meticulously edited by Evelyn J. Hinz, should strike one initially as being informative rather than controversial, revealing rather than challenging. Indeed, the range of texts considered here — the four Gospels, memoirs of Canadian servicemen, Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, Frida Kahlo’s letters to Ella Wolfe, Gertrude Stein’s The Mother of Us All, among others — is an indication of how accom modating the new critical engagement with life-writing can be. Ten essays deal with specific texts while two provide theoretical discus sions, respectively, of autobiography and biography. Readers seeking a fuller understanding of possible critical stances towards the genre might wish to begin with Philip Dodd’s essay on autobiography and Ira Nadel’s discussion of biography. Along with Hinz’s stimulating introduction, they provide a useful context within which the other essays can be assessed. The title of Dodd’s essay, “ History or Fiction: Balancing Contemporary Autobiography’s Claims,” goes to the heart of much theoretical speculation on autobiography. Dodd’s direct yet forceful argument is that current re sponse to autobiography is inconsistent, if not quite muddled, because there is no common understanding of what the term signifies. Dodd’s case against those who see autobiography as fiction is that the self becomes the product of art (for traditional critics) or the product of textuality (for more radical readers such as Derrida and de Man). Dodd comes down on the autobiography -as-history side of the question but with several qualifications, which he illustrates by citing the example of Ronald Fraser’s In Search of a Past (1984). He sees Fraser’s deployment of both oral history and psychoanalysis as a desirable model because it allows for two competing modes of construct ing the past and the self, it accommodates collective experience, it provides the opportunity for general and theoretical reflection, and it increases the difficulty for the narrator to assimilate others to his story. While Dodd’s essay might be welcomed as a challenge to the purity of the autobiography-as-fiction claim, it is ultimately too prescriptive in offering one text as a model for future autobiographers. Dodd’s essay is valuable, however, not only as an important contribution to the critical debate on the nature of autobiography, but for reminding us of the complexity and formal variety of the genre. As such, it can illuminate our reading of some of the other essays. For example, Kertzer’s cogent essay on Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave demonstrates how the process of writing about one’s life releases two competing needs or spirits in the author — variously defined as head and heart, reason and desire, pilot and devil — 104 and these two spirits operate as competing narrative urges within the text, one orderly, the other disruptive. By demonstrating that the content and form of the work can cater to such disparate impulses, Kertzer reveals the range of rhetorical devices and variety of approaches autobiography is capable of marshalling in its attempt to provide access to selfhood. Ronald Ayling brings to bear a similar sensitivity to the conventions and complexities of the autobiographical form in “The ‘Politics’ of Childhood Autobiographies: O’Casey and Soyinka.” He argues convincingly that mem oirs of childhood, far from always evoking a sense of wonder and evincing a lyrical intensity, frequently reveal an alienation from, and questioning of, the status quo. Ayling shows how the Irish and Nigerian playwrights present the adult world as alien and oppressive places, a condition analogous to the situation of their country as a colony under the domination of a foreign power. Thus, the focus on the individual’s awakening consciousness and intellectual development is couched in terms that possess political, social, and ideological resonances. Similarly, Timothy Dow Adams, writing on Frank Conroy’s auto biographical work, Stop-time, also recognizes that it is often in the degree to which narrative conventions and formal procedures are...