Biography, vol. 29, no. 4 (2006)

Cover Art

Editors’ Note, p. v

ARTICLES

Erica L. Johnson
Auto-Ghostwriting Smile, Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, p. 563
Jean Rhys’s Smile, Please: An Unfinished Autobiography was not actually written by Rhys, but by novelist David Plante in an act that can only be characterized as ghostwriting. This essay theorizes ghostwriting in the context of autobiography and life writing, and shows how the ghostwriting process results in contested layers of written and spoken texts. Rhys resists the ghostwriter’s displacement of her spoken text by quoting her own written texts verbatim throughout Smile, Please, thus in effect auto-ghostwriting her autobiography.

Kylie Cardell
Bloodsport: Thomas Goltz and the Journalist’s Diary of War, p. 584
This article examines how the war correspondent Thomas Goltz negotiates the representation of war and conflict, and the exigencies of his profession as a journalist, through diary. Particularly in Chechnya Diary, the second in his “Caucasus Trilogy,” Goltz uses the diary to focus on his profession and to make particular ethical and moral dilemmas visible. For Goltz, diary is a political tool, but the problem is it is also a personal device.

Mark Maslan
Biographical Fraud Traumatic Nationalism: Joseph Ellis’s Vietnam Testimony, p. 605
In 2001, the Boston Globe reported that Joseph Ellis, an award-winning presidential biographer and professor of history, had lied to students and reporters about having served in the Vietnam War. This essay presents the Ellis scandal as an example of how traumatic events serve as vehicles for national affiliation, and of how the concept of trauma misrepresents our relationship to history.

Phyllis E. Wachter
Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2005–2006, p. 615

REVIEWS

Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women: Violet Hunt, Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen, Janice Biala, by Joseph Wiesenfarth, p. 726
Reviewed by Max Saunders

Women and the Politics of Travel, 1870–1914, by Monica Anderson, p. 733
Reviewed by Barbara T. Gates

Traveling South: Travel Narratives and the Construction of American Identity, by John D. Cox, p. 736
Reviewed by Edlie L. Wong

Sovereign Selves: American Indian Autobiography and the Law, by David J. Carlson, p. 740
Reviewed by Laura L. Mielke

Late-Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography, by Joanna Summers, p. 742
Reviewed by Elizabeth Schirmer

English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Survey, by Allan Pritchard, p. 745
Reviewed by Peter McCullough

Women Writing Africa. Vol. 2: West Africa and the Sahel, edited by Esi Sutherland-Addy and Aminata Diaw, p. 747
Reviewed by Lisa McNee

Narrating the Holocaust, by Andrea Reiter, p. 751
Reviewed by David Brauner

Hitler’s Face: The Biography of an Image, by Claudia Schmölders, p. 753
Reviewed by Richard T. Gray

La Forme des jours: pour une poétique du journal personnel, by Michel Braud, p. 756
Reviewed by Virginia Ricard

Genèse, censure, autocensure, by Catherine Viollet and Claire Bustarret, p. 759
Reviewed by Virginia Ricard

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 762
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 806

INDEX, p. 809