Biography, vol. 30, no. 4 (2007)

Cover Art

Editors’ Note, iii

ARTICLES

Against Depression: Final Knowledge in Styron, Mairs, and Solomon
Lee Zimmerman, p. 465

If contemporary depression narratives sometimes allude to the difficulty of representing such an elusive subject as depression, ultimately they purvey an ostensibly “final” knowledge. Reading such narratives by William Styron, Nancy Mairs, and Andrew Solomon, I argue that, in purveying such knowledge, these texts, often presented as “useful,” may at the same time reproduce depression’s central dilemma—symptomatically reenacting the failure of meaning at depression’s center.

Mediating Historical Memory in Family Memoirs: K. Connie Kang’s Home Was the Land of Morning Calm and Duong Van Mai Elliott’s The Sacred Willow
Rocío G. Davis, p. 491

This essay analyzes forms of historical mediation through auto/biographical writing by proposing how history may be mediated structurally and thematically. Using K. Connie Kang’s Home was the Land of Morning Calm (1995) and Duong Van Mai Elliott’s The Sacred Willow (1999), the article explores how Asian/American family memoirs also create cultural memory to empower a community through historical knowledge and awareness of cultural location in society.

Annual Bibliography of Works About Life Writing, 2006–2007
Phyllis E. Wachter and William Todd Schultz, p. 512

REVIEWS

Satan: A Biography, by Henry Ansgar Kelly
Reviewed by James H. Morey, p. 633

Imagining the Sacred Past: Hagiography and Power in Early Normandy, by Samantha Kahn Herrick
Reviewed by David Crouch, p. 635

Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices, edited by Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly
Reviewed by Jessica C. Murphy, p. 637

The Captive’s Position: Female Narrative, Male Identity, and Royal Authority in Colonial New England, by Teresa A. Toulouse
Reviewed by Ralph Bauer, p. 640

Rhetorical Drag: Gender Impersonation, Captivity, and the Writing of History, by Lorrayne Carroll
Reviewed by Teresa A. Toulouse, p. 642

Aspects of Samuel Johnson: Essays on His Arts, Mind, Afterlife, and Politics, by Howard D. Weinbrot
Reviewed by Greg Clingham, p. 645

The Wake of Wellington: Englishness in 1852, by Peter W. Sinnema
Reviewed by Cornelia Pearsall, p. 649

Race and Form: Towards a Contextualized Narratology of African American Autobiography, by Dejin Xu
Reviewed by Jennifer Terry, p. 651

Scripted Geographies: Travel Writings by Nineteenth-Century Spanish Authors, by Gayle R. Nunley
Reviewed by Jorge L. Bacelis, p. 654

Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, edited by Jeffrey Ruoff
Reviewed by Joel Black, p. 658

Ecritures du moi et idéologies chez les romancières francophones, by Tang Alice Delphine
Reviewed by Brian Gordon Kennelly, p. 661

Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory, by Christopher Bigsby
Reviewed by Lars Fischer, p. 663

The Philosopher’s I: Autobiography and the Search for the Self, by J. Lenore Wright
Reviewed by Marya Schechtman, p. 666

REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, p. 670
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest

CONTRIBUTORS, p. 724

INDEX: VOLUME 30: 2007, 727