Editor’s Note, p. iii

ARTICLES

The Exile and the Ghostwriter: East-West Biographical Politics and The Private Life of Chairman Mao, p. 481
Margaretta Jolly

This article examines the biographical politics of The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Mao’s physician Zhisui Li. As a debunking exposé, it represents revived critical ambitions for the genre in China, despite its official ban there. At the same time, it reflects U.S. commercial and ideological interests through the ghost-writing of the U.S. Sinologist and journalist Anne Thurston. Thurston’s own dissatisfaction with Li’s lack of personal confession is also assessed in the light of the political role of autobiography as well as biography across West and East.

Reading as Re-Vision: Approaches to Reading Manuscript Dairies, p. 504
Cynthia A. Huff

“Reading as Re-Vision” argues that readers of manuscript diaries might profitably avoid textually-based reading strategies in favor of ones conducive to a multimedia approach, since nineteenth-century British women often constructed themselves and their diaries not as records of a unitary self but rather as chronicles of significant others and the empire.

Beyond the Master Letters: A Computerized Word Content Analysis of Emily Dickinson Correspondence with Samuel Bowles and Susan Gilbert, p. 524
John F. McDermott

Computerized word content analysis of Emily Dickinson’s Master Letters, in comparison with letters written to two leading candidates for Master, is unable to identify either as “Master.” Nevertheless, it yields new biographical information differentiating Dickinson’s relationship with these two important figures in her life during the time in which the Master Letters are thought to have been written.

REVIEWS

How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, by Paul John Eakin, p. 534
Reviewed by Thomas R. Smith

Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy, by Wendy S. Hesford, p. 538
Reviewed by Adele Flood

Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back, by Janice Haaken, p. 542
Reviewed by Anne M. Wyatt-Brown

Sun Turned to Darkness: Memory and Recovery in the Holocaust Memoir, by David Patterson, p. 547
Reviewed by Hilene Flanzbaum

Captured: The Japanese Internment of American Civilians in the Philippines, by Frances B. Cogan, p. 549
Reviewed by Lynn Z. Bloom

Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, by Penny Summerfield, p. 552
Reviewed by Judy Giles

Telling Women’s Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/Text, by Judy Long, p. 555
Reviewed by Cynthia J. Davis

Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, edited by Frances Wilson, p. 558
Reviewed by Moyra Haslett

Lawrence of Arabia: A Film’s Anthropology, by Steven C. Caton, p. 560
Reviewed by Ellis Hanson

Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography, by Timothy Dow Adams, p. 563
Reviewed by Paul Delany

One Lifetime, Many Lives: The Experience of Modern Hindu Hagiography, by Robin Rinehart, p. 565
Reviewed by Daniel Gold

Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America, by Kenneth Mostern, p. 568
Reviewed by Tess Chakkalakal

Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place, by Louis Owens, p. 572
Reviewed by G. Reginald Daniel

Franklin and His Friends: Portraying the Man of Science in Eighteenth-Century America, by Brandon Frame Fortune with Deborah J. Warner, p. 578
Reviewed by Robert Middlekauff

Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America, by Mary Klages, p. 579
Reviewed by Cindy LaCom

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 583
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

LIFELINES, p. 639
Upcoming events, calls for papers, and news from the field

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 647