Genre Of Autobiography Research Articles

Who/what is the subject? Representations of self in late twentieth-century French art

Word and image studies focus customarily on the relationship between literature and painting, approached either thematically, as in the classical ut pictura poesis tradition, or as semiotic systems, in the wake of Lessing's seminal study.' Alternatively, they examine the interface between verbal texts and their visual illustrations. However, to date a rich area of inquiry remains insufficiently tapped - the application of theoretical constructs developed in one domain to the creative practices of another. Literary theory, for example, has much to offer to the analysis of certain painterly phenomena; and art theory can shed light on the verbal arts.' This kind of exchange is likely to appear most desirable at times of transition, when a canon expands or undergoes radical changes. My concern here is precisely with such an occurrence within the genre of the representation of self, during the 1970S and 1980s, decades known as postmodern. While my analysis centers on French theory and practice, its potential applications are in no way nationally bound. During the period examined, a variety of oblique 'returns' to premodern artistic practices have taken place - among these being the genres of autobiography and self-portrait - which modernism at its height had devalorized. The tool of choice for theorizing the recent reemergence of self-portraiture in French painting proved - for me - to be literary genre theory (complemented by philosophical reflection on the question of subjectivity). Yet, as we shall see, it was a term taken from painting, the pictorial self-portrait ('autoportait' in French) that provided the French taxonomy of literary autobiography with a name for a new category meant to reflect the expansion of the genre and its theory beyond their earlier canonical boundaries. I in turn borrow this renewed literary taxonomy to shed light on painting, using the literary category now named 'autoportrait' to think through new versions of self-representation in the visual arts. To foreground this reciprocity (and to some extent convergence), I take the liberty of using 'autoportrait' (and its variants) to refer both to verbal and visual art, alongside the Anglo-Saxon 'self-portrait', which refers strictly to visual art. The notion of representation of self, throughout this article and in the title, subsumes all three connotations. The ensuing analysis pursues a dual goal: to document and interpret contemporary French pictorial auto-portraiture; and to stimulate reflection on the nature of interart connections as well as on the workings of theory.

Autobiography as Performative Utterance

My participation in this forum is oddly--but pleasantly--overdetermined. I presume that I might be considered a plausible contributor to a discussion of autobiography and disability if we employ a capacious definition of autobiography and biography as "life writing," whereunder it could be said that I have contributed to the genre of life writing about disability by writing about my second child, Jamie, who is now eight years old and was born with Down syndrome. The fact that my book on Jamie, Life As We Know It, is not an autobiography is important to my understanding of the issues relevant to this discussion, so although I hope to speak directly to some of those issues, I necessarily come at them somewhat aslant. But, as it happens, this is not my only angle of approach here. The other reason I might be a plausible discussant is probably opaque to everyone in the profession save for Tom Couser, whose second book, Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography I reviewed for the Journal of English and Germanic Philology (JEGP) some years ago. 1 My reading Couser's book was, at the time, a happy accident: not long after I arrived at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the fall of 1989, I was invited to review something for the University of Illinois's only humanities journal, JEGP. But because no one at JEGP knew exactly what kind of book I was supposed to be competent to review (and, as a terrified first-year assistant professor, neither did I), they chose a book almost at random. And so Altered Egos became, for no good reason, the first book I reviewed in my life, and I am not sure that anyone other than Tom Couser and JEGP's editors ever read that review. I am sure [End Page 339] that when I reviewed the book, I did not know that Couser would go on to make a substantial contribution to an emergent field called "disability studies," just as I had no idea that I would wind up working in the field myself. This point of dual intersection is more than simple coincidence. For I learned from reading Altered Egos that the genre of autobiography, long understood by scholars from Georges Gusdorf to James Olney to be a vehicle for (relatively) unmediated self-expression, can be fruitfully approached from its most problematic and "marginal" instances--not only slave narratives, formerly excluded from autobiography proper for rather spurious theoretical reasons, but even co-authored and/or edited texts as corrupt as John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks. Altered Egos, representing what I could call the poststructuralist turn in studies of life writing, thus seeks to illuminate the genre precisely by bringing to light the features that are normally considered to threaten or violate the boundaries of the genre. To this end, Couser writes that "far from being an anomaly . . . Black Elk Speaks may represent the general condition of autobiography, which always seeks--but always fails--to recapture 'aboriginal' experience, and whose ontological status is perhaps less important than the question of how it was produced or constructed." 2 This is a broadly deconstructive move, designed both to draw out instructive "infelicities" in American autobiography and to reconstitute such infelicities as the very condition of possibility for autobiography as traditionally understood. And, I believe, it has been largely successful, both on its own terms and for how it has opened the door, so to speak, to quite broad theoretical questions about the social and historical conditions of composition, production, dissemination, and reception of all forms of life writing, particularly including those forms under discussion at present. Then again, there are poststructuralisms and then there are poststructuralisms. It is one thing to inquire--after the manner of the Foucault of "What is an Author?"--into the conditions of production of autobiography and life writing; it is quite another thing to suggest (as Couser does not but as one Foucauldian strand of...

Thinking in Pictures (review)

Hume Studies Volume XXVI, Number 1, April 2000, pp. 198-200 TEMPLE GRANDIN. Thinking in Pictures, Foreword by Oliver Sacks. New York:Vintage Books/Random House, 1996. Pp. 222. ISBN 067977289 $12.00 paper. Late British Empiricism was a research project built around a two-part psychological theory: that thoughts represent their objects by qualitatively resembling them (the "Theory of Ideas") and that thought proceeds by traversing associative links between ideas ("associationism"). The work of Hume, and then of Mill, were the project's high-water marks; twentieth-century philosophers no longer find the psychology convincing. The problem, as far as the philosophers were concerned, was not so much that the account seemed false upon introspection, nor that the discipline of psychology had itself moved on, but that the psychological theory did not make good on its explanatory obligations : most importantly, a thought's being a mental picture is not a satisfactory account of why it has the content it does. But this reason for rejecting Empiricist psychology, that it could not do its assigned philosophical job, leaves open the possibility of minds for which it is nonetheless a satisfactory description. Grandin's contribution to the emerging genre of autobiography by highfunctioning autistics will interest contemporary Humeans, because it is a window into a mind of which Hume's psychology is for the most part true. As her title suggests, Grandin's thoughts consist of images; words, she says, are like a second language to her. The segue from image to image is associative, and so the puzzles of empiricist theory—how to reconstruct this or that kind of thought, using only associations between images—are for Grandin practical problems. Recall Hume's attempt on the theoretical problem of making mental pictures of particulars do duty for abstract concepts (T 17-24); here is Grandin facing the same difficulty. I quote an example at length to give the flavor of her writing: Spatial words such as "over" and "under" had no meaning for me until I had a visual image to fix them in my memory. Even now, when I hear the word "under" by itself, I automatically picture myself getting under the cafeteria tables at school during an air-raid drill, a common occurrence on the East Coast during the early fifties. The first memory that any single word triggers is almost always a childhood memory. I can remember the teacher telling us to be quiet and walking single-file into the cafeteria, where six or eight children huddled under each table. If I continue on the same train of thought, more and more associative memories of elementary school emerge. I can remember the teacher scolding me after I hit Alfred for putting dirt on Hume Studies Book Reviews 199 my shoe. All of these memories play like videotapes in the VCR of my imagination. If I allow my mind to keep associating, it will wander a million miles away from the word "under", to submarines under the Antarctic and the Beatles song "Yellow Submarine". If I let my mind pause on the picture of the yellow submarine, I then hear the song. As I start humming the song and get to the part about people coming on board, my association switches to the gangway of a ship I saw in Australia (30). The effect of an abstract concept must be managed by surveying fully particular images, and in an associationist mind, associated but irrelevant images tend to—in Hume's phrase—"immediately crowd in upon us": thinking abstractly in this way is more difficult than Hume seems to realize. (Notice, however, the Kantian "I" in Grandin's description, apparently able to intervene to control the flow of associations. While the mind we are seeing is predominantly Humean, it may not be entirely so.) Like many persons with autism, Grandin has difficulty understanding ordinary emotional and social life, and David Owen has taken her to show "what people might be like, and what they would lack, if they were instantiations of pure Humean reason .. .'n Grandin's own account suggests that Owen is off-base here: she experiences Humean passions, and her ability empathicalIy to understand the feelings of...

Prospective elementary science teachers and biomythographies: An exploratory approach to autobiographical research

This study explores an approach to autobiographical research based on a notion of “outlaw genre” autobiography referred to as biomythography. Outlaw genres of autobiography resist the tendency of western autobiography to craft narratives that will ultimately link the life of an individual to a universalised person—someone to whom all readers can relate. In this study, photo essays are used to learn about prospective elementary teachers' stories of science and science education. The photo essays and the theoretical framework of “biomythography” helped us reflect on layers mediating teaching and learning in our courses. Implications of the study call for us to examine hegemonies extending from our students' personal histories as science learners, and through mythologies of teacher education. Alternative research frameworks and approaches, such as those represented in this study, might help science teacher educators explore myths undermining the preparation of future science teachers and learners.

A Matter of Style: How Olivia Langdon Clemens and Charles Dudley Warner Tried to Team and to Tame the Genius of Mark Twain

ROM Twain's 'Burlesque' Autobiography, composed in 1870, to The Death of Jean in 19o9, writing and experimenting with the genre of autobiography was one of Mark Twain's enduring preoccupations. Both editors and critics have given a great deal of attention to the author's autobiographical writings and dictations, but his first serious effort in that line, an eleven-page holograph account of his life written at the end of January 1873, remains unpublished to this day. With the exception of the detailed account it contains of how Sam Clemens came to call himself Mark Twain, the sketch has not been appreciated either for its chronological priority or its

Maya Angelou: a critical companion

The Life and Works of Maya Angelou The Genre of Autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) Gather Together in My Name (1974) Singing' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976) The Heart of a Woman (1981) All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986) Bibliography Index

The fragmentary subject

Official reports by First World War women welfare supervisors, women police and patrols, have the potential to reveal tensions women were working within and against in these unprecedented careers. Not usually considered within the genre of autobiography, reports which women wrote of their work for the consumption of their superiors define the construction of their official selves through their dealings with their subjects—working-class women. Drawing upon feminist literary theory concerning subjectivity and self-representation enabled me to examine these documents as textual constructions of necessarily fragmentary subjectivities. Reading these texts in terms of self-representation and the indirect construction of subjectivity allowed me to recognise women’s strategies to assert their competency, and the need for their professional work, within the contemporary conventions of report writing. Their fragmentary constructions of novel professional subjectivities allow us to see specific instances of women’s creative resistances, complicity and willful self-formulation. In this essay I call for dialogue and reciprocity between feminist historians and feminist literary critics. While feminist historians can fruitfully use literary theory, such as that relating to subjectivity and self-representation, other feminist scholars can benefit from examinations of fragmentary constructions of the self by historical subjects in specific historical circumstances, especially the ways women subjects have negotiated within masculinist systems.

Gender Politics and the Study of Nineteenth-Century Autobiography

This article discusses ideologically-slanted reactions to the study of British Victorian autobiography, a “male-dominated” literary genre, as an example of the “social agendas” currently operative in the study of the humanities. It focuses on the publication and reception of the book The Genre of Autobiography in Victorian Literature (1994a). Literary autobiography for the Victorians was a referential, nonfiction genre, which, with conventional pressures applied through historicity and verifiability, required the conflation of mental or spiritual (inner) development and the (outer) development of career and reputation based on publications (along with other public works). The field of men's studies opens up a space within which male writers like the Victorian autobiographers can be studied unapologetically from a variety of theoretical perspectives.

“Death as Life”: Political metaphor in the testimonial prison literature of Kanno Suga

This essay argues that what most clearly reveals Kanno Suga's last texts to be “resistance literature” was her use of figurative language to express the idea that death is life. In the prison diary and letters she wrote in the week before her execution for treason, Kanno repeatedly used metaphors of regeneration in connection with her faith in the revolutionary immortality she and her co-defendants would be accorded and in the ultimate victory of Truth and the anarchist Cause. Appearances notwithstanding, the Japanese state had only won this round of the fight. This essay also reflects upon the plural nature of Kanno's resistance whereby in these late texts, in effect, she practiced a subversion of more than one social institution. Attributing to Kanno a subversion of literary canons as well, the author situates the prison diary within a transnational “out-law” genre of autobiography described today as “testimonio” (testimonial literature).Kanno Suga (1881–1911) achieved the dubious distinction of being the first female political prisoner in Japan's modern history to be executed. She was the one woman among twenty-four Meiji socialists to be sentenced to death early in 1911 for her involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate the emperor. Yet Kanno Suga is noteworthy for reasons other than for her role in the so-called Meiji High Treason Incident. As one of Japan's first feminists and also one of its first female journalists, she played an active role in various social movements in the Meiji era (1868–1912). Any one of these factors would qualify Kanno as a significant historical figure. Historians of Japan, however, have long tended either to ignore her or to focus their attention on her love life. Doubtless some have seen her as merely the “other half” of the “more important” anarchist theorist Kotoku Shusui, while others have apparently concluded that her romantic involvements are the most noteworthy features of her life. The fact that even works of women's history published in Japan seem preoccupied with Kanno Suga's romantic involvements suggests that it has not only been “within mainstream U.S. feminism [that] the good insistence that ‘the personal is political’ often transformed itself into something like ‘only the personal is political’.”

"Sista Docta": Performance as Critique of the Academy

Before I even open my mouth with these words and drummer Alli Aweusi strikes first PA on djembe, critique of academy has begun. sista docta was created in 1994 as seriate sketches that offer my commentary on being an African American woman professor at predominantly European American academic institutions.' This essay explores ways performance in general, and sista docta specifically, challenges academy's philosophy of inclusion and academy's predilection for print scholarship. By time I speak in sista docta, there has already been drumming, which invokes long history of African American women in academy. That history is a collective biography marked on downside by exclusion, silence, and overt and covert discrimination, and on upside by determination, courage, and achievement. While genre of autobiography explores singularity of experience, autobiography of marginalized peoples often serves as a collective biography, giving name to experiences of many through experience of one.2 In a discussion of Maya Angelou's autobiographical work, Selwyn Cudjoe explains that the Afro-American autobiography, a cultural act of selfreading, is meant to reflect a public concern rather than a private act of selfindulgence (1990:275). African American autobiography as collective cultural

The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess in Eighteenth-Century Korea.

Lady Hyegyong's memoirs, which recount the chilling murder of her husband by his father, is one of the best known and most popular classics of Korean literature. From 1795 until 1805 Lady Hyegyong composed this masterpiece, which depicts a court life whose drama and pathos is of Shakespearean proportions. Presented in its social, cultural, and historical contexts, this complete English translation opens a door into a world teeming with conflicting passions, political intrigue, and the daily preoccupations of a deeply intelligent and articulate woman. JaHyun Kim Haboush's accurate, fluid translation captures the intimate and expressive voice of this consummate storyteller. The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong is a unique exploration of Korean selfhood and of how the genre of autobiography fared in premodern times.

Denominated "SAVAGE": Methodism, Writing, and Identity in the Works of William Apess, a Pequot

IN 1829, A THIRTY-ONE YEAR OLD PEQUOT PREACHER NAMED WILLIAM Apess gained notoriety with the publication of his memoir. Titled A Son of the Forest, it was the first full-length autobiography published by a Native American.' Like African Americans, it was through the genre of autobiography that Indians effected their first significant interventions in Euro-American print culture.2 As numerous critics have noted, this is paradoxical, as the production and publication of an autobiography assumes at least three conditions, none of which automatically apply to those on the margins of society: an appreciation of the importance of one's experience; an interested, literate audience; and access to resources for printing and distribution.3 This essay begins by asking how an impoverished Pequot could presume to publish his autobiography, let alone numerous caustic polemics against white racism. The answer is found in a place that may seem unlikely to many: Apess's Methodism. Apess's work is admired today for the modem tone of its attack on the Puritans' providential conception of history and the brand of racism that it sanctioned. But Apess was no anachronism; the upheavals of his day were the enabling condition of his voice. He wrote at the intersection of three highly-charged controversies of the 1820s and 1830s: Andrew Jackson's plan to expel Indians from the southeast, immediatist-abolitionism, and the Second Great Awakening. Apess played on Euro-Americans' temporarily heightened interest in Indians

: The Genre of Autobiography in Victorian Literature. . Clinton Machann.

: The Genre of Autobiography in Victorian Literature. . Clinton Machann.

Review: The Genre of Autobiography in Victorian Literature., by Clinton Machann

Review: <i>The Genre of Autobiography in Victorian Literature.</i>, by Clinton Machann

Framing The Book of Jessica: Transformation and the Collaborative Process in Canadian Theatre

FRAMING THE BOOK OF JESSICA: TRANSFORMATION AND THE COLLABORATIVE PROCESS IN CANADIAN THEATRE JENNIFER ANDREWS University of Toronto D e s p i t e the emergence of feminist theatre criticism in North America, little attention has been given to the topic of feminist collaborative projects, which form an integral part of the contemporary theatre scene in Canada and the United States. This paucity is particularly apparent given the popularity of theatre projects that challenge the conventional attribution of authorship to an individual, as the writer, producer, or director of a performance.1 Within English Canada, a number of feminist theatre troupes have emerged over the past two decades, including Nightwood, formed in 1978,2 and the Company of Sirens, founded in 1985.3 While these troupes are certainly not the only collaborative theatre organizations in the country, the lack of doc­ umentation on this topic makes it difficult to determine how many groups actually exist and manage to survive.4 Nevertheless, the processes and prod­ ucts of these companies play an important role in demonstrating how notions of authorship are complex and usually politically bound. In an effort to change structures built into the theatre that favour the recognition of in­ dividual contributions to a final product,5 collectives like Nightwood have favoured the equal billing of everyone involved in the project in order to ac­ knowledge that “theatre depends on the energies of many people — actors, technicians, [and] audience members” (“Fragments” 172). Similarly, the Company of Sirens has called upon those watching the performance to work with the troupe in the creation of new scenes, thereby breaking down the bar­ riers that traditionally separate the actors from audience members. Diane Bessai’s book on collective creation in Canada is devoted to what is perhaps the most prominent experimental theatre group in the country as well as the site of a feminist project that has formed the subject of recent scholarly debate, Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille. Jessica, a play co-authored by Native Canadian writer Marie Campbell and Anglo-Canadian actress Linda Griffiths, was published in 1989 as The Book of Jessica in the form of a text that contains not only the playscript but also a lengthy commentary by both women on the process of their own theatrical and textual collabo­ ration. Questions of transformation and framing continue to be raised by English Stu d ie s in Ca n a d a , 22, 3, September 1996 feminist theatre troupes in English Canada. Moving away from standard notions of authorship and the authority of the printed text is central to the work of Nightwood and the Company of Sirens, among others. Yet, Jes­ sica is unique, because of its lengthy and varied history in the forms of a playscript, performance, and part of a published book. Discussions of Jessica have focussed on the issue of collaboration as manifested textually,6 and on “the voices and genres of autobiography” (Egan 24) as constructed in The Book of Jessica.7 In contrast, I want to consider how the transformations of Jessica and the frames through which it has been expressed contribute to a reading of the broader feminist collaborative process undertaken by Campbell and Griffiths. The contents of the published text entitled The Book of Jessica: A The­ atrical Transformation demonstrate a substantial shift from the project’s beginnings. The book consists of a chronological “history” of the play’s development, two chapters of taped conversations between Griffiths and Campbell that are mediated by Griffiths’s own commentary, and, finally, the playscript of Jessica.8 Even the notes to Jessica indicate the fluctuation of creative input and the variety of authorial voices involved in this project: “Written by: Maria Campbell, Linda Griffiths, Paul Thompson” becomes “Written by: Linda Griffiths, in collaboration with Maria Campbell” in a later production (Book 115). Thus, transformation is an integral part of the various versions of Jessica’s story, as a collaborative project, dramatic production, and chapter of a book. Moreover, in each case Jessica is placed within a framework or context that demarcates the possible variations that can be made to the work.9 The theatre, in particular, offers a unusual set of...

The genre of autobiography in Victorian literature

The genre of autobiography in Victorian literature

Russian Modernism and the Female Voice: A Case Study

In her recent work on women's biography, Carolyn Heilbrun focuses on the difficulty faced by women authors who wish to express uniquely female experiences in a language that discounts, marginalizes or silences the female voice. Arguing in Writing a Woman's Life that live our lives through texts and can only retell and live by the we have read or heard, Heilbrun notes the problems this creates for the female author, who finds her text constrained and distorted by the (male) that have preceded it. Even the intensely personal genre of autobiography is affected and deformed by this process: We tell ourselves of our past, make fictions or of it, and these narrations become the past, the only part of our lives that is not submerged.2 For Heilbrun, finding the female voice involves freeing oneself from the plots that bind both the literary and the literal imagination. In her plea for stories that will affect other and, eventually, lives, Heilbrun conflates the search for literary authenticity and self-realization. The end of the dream of is Heilbrun's prescription for both women's literature and life. When the fantasy of closure is abandoned, both life and literary expressions of it will become more authentic, and adventure for women will begin.3 Heilbrun's argument is striking, in part, for the remarkable parallel it offers to the concerns of early modernist prose writers, both male and female, in the beginning of this century. Heilbrun deals primarily with accounts of and by women, and her comments are purposely offered without recourse to the vocabulary of modernist aesthetics. Yet the issues she raises are vital to that movement. Her comment, for

A Marginal "I": The Autobiographical Self Deconstructed in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiography The Woman Warrior deconstructs the genre of autobiography and, in doing so, associated American ideologies. Disenfranchised by gender and by cultural displacement, the author finds an identity by fictionalizing herself. Comparing her approach to Richard Rodriguez' in Hunger of Memory (which addresses similar concerns and which also focusses on language) illuminates how Kingston deconstructs the genre.

Les Singeries De Marcel, or Marcel's Antics

major work of political philosophy; Emile, an equally influential treatise on education; and his Confessions, a masterpiece in the genre of autobiography. But his range was wide: his interests also included music, the theatre, botany. His involvement with dance was marginal, but his originality of mind, which brought him into conflict with virtually every other writer and thinker of his day, ensures that his comments merit the attention of all who are interested in eighteenth-century dance. In Emile (1762) Rousseau maps out his ideal education, describing in detail the upbringing of Emile, his imaginary pupil, from birth to manhood. Some of his ideas found ready acceptance for example, the value of breast-feeding for nutrition and maternal bonding, and the importance of physical exercise. His liberal attitude to religion, on the other hand, caused the book to be publicly burned, and the author condemned for heresy, both in Catholic France and Protestant Geneva. It was not to be expected that the advocate of the 'return to nature' should find himself particularly in sympathy with the educational aims and methods of most eighteenth-century teachers of ballet.

Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography by Timothy Dow Adams (review)

248Rocky Mountain Review TIMOTHY DOW ADAMS. Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. 205 p. Working from a critical commonplace of the last thirty years—that autobiography is inherently unreliable because writers cannot avoid selectively shaping their own pasts—Timothy Dow Adams argues that literal inaccuracy in autobiography may serve as "one of the most powerful avenues into the self-identity ofthe writer" (170). Adams treats five twentieth-century American writers who were labeled liars by their contemporaries and whose works blend the genres of autobiography, biography, memoir, and fiction: Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Richard Wright, Mary McCarthy, and Lillian Hellman. Focusing on a writer's pattern ofdistortion in autobiography, Adams maintains, can provide insight into his or her search for a personal myth, a coherent identity shaped by necessarily selective memory. "Personal authenticity," he argues, should be the final test of autobiographical value, not literal truthfulness, for "lying" in autobiography (either deliberate, subconscious, or some combination of both) can be a vehicle for rigorous metaphorical truth. None ofthis seems particularly new to me (Adams, indeed, repeatedly cites previous critics to paraphrase his points, especially John Paul Eakin and Roy Pascal). The text itself also sometimes lacks cohesive focus. Adams argues, for instance, that Gertrude Stein takes on the persona of Alice B. Toklas for a variety ofreasons, some ofwhich seem at least potentially mutually exclusive: she wants at once to reflect "the specific atmosphere of bohemian Paris" (22) and to present herselfas a "great American folk-hero" (37); she wants to conceal her homosexuality yet embody the nature of her relationship with Alice B. Toklas; she wants to mythologize herself as an artist and to employ the deliberately exaggerated tone ofthe tall tale. On a macro-level, one might also ask why Adams focuses on these five writers in particular, since a variety of hypotheses are posed for their tendency to tell lies in their autobiographies, including time and place (Stein, Hellman), childhood circumstances (Anderson, McCarthy), race (Wright), personality (Hellman), and religion (McCarthy). One rhetorical quibble deserves noting here, too: Adams sometimes makes points simply by reporting that a passage, understood by previous critics to be straightfaced , is actually ironic; or by arguing from his own simple assertion of the text's content ("By these statements, Stein meant ..." [35]). This reader, at least, would like more demonstration of how Adams knows these things—for Telling Lies itself elsewhere argues convincingly that writers themselves may not always know "the truth" about their meanings. That all said, Telling Lies does draw together a wide range of sources, and some individual chapters and individual points are provocative. The chapters on Richard Wright and Sherwood Anderson, in particular, are well argued, unified, and insightful. Students ofthe other three writers, too, ought certainly to read Telling Lies, for the work demonstrates the interesting questions and hypotheses that may be raised about familiar works by recent autobiographical theory. Readers familiar with that theory may not be all that much more enlightened by Telling Lies, and they may, like this reader, come away with questions that trouble them (I wonder, for instance, whether Adams would argue that lies in autobiography always function as metaphors, or just the Book Reviews249 lies in the works ofcanonical, professional writers). Still, Telling Lies is worth a look for students of autobiography as well as for students of the writers in question, if only to remind one of the many-layered complexity—and the dangers—involved in interpreting the story of a life. SUSAN H. SWETNAM Idaho State University NINA AUERBACH. Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. 132 p. Readers ofNina Auerbach's work expect her to deliver, with verve and grace, some striking aperçus into nineteenth-century literature and culture, and her new volume does not disappoint. Private Theatricals takes a less exclusively feminist approach to its subject than her earlier works, Woman and the Demon: The Life ofa Victorian Myth and Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction, and its uncovering of further unexpected links between Victorians' lives and their art is, perhaps as a result, all the more insightful. Auerbach's thesis here is...