Biography volume 40, number 3 (Summer 2017) includes the following announcement from co-editor John David Zuern:
For many years Biography‘s occasional feature “Sketches from Life” has made room for more personal essays by life writing scholars reflecting on practical, theoretical, and ethical issues related to their particular projects. We are rechristening this feature “First Person” to underscore the notion that scholars are the “first persons” in their academic writing and that scholarly projects are always, in one way or another, chapters in their authors’ life stories. In most cases, the autobiographical aspects of research are necessarily submerged in the final product, more or less invisible to the reader apart from sporadic appearances of the author’s directorial “I,” but sometimes the story of how an article or book came into being is as exciting and enlightening as the ideas the text has to offer. It is with this conviction that we are renewing our call for first-person memoirs of critical practice. Interested authors should query us about their plans before submitting manuscripts. (from Editor’s Note, vol. 40, no. 3)
Complete submission guidelines are available here.
In this Issue
- “Why Obscure the Record?: The Psychological Context of Willa Cather’s Ban on Letter Publication” by Andrew Jewell
- “‘Strange Imagination’: Valentine Greatrakes’s Healing Aura and the Autobiographical Impulse” by Jayne Lewis
- “Putting Lives on the Record: The Book as Material and Symbol in Life Writing” by Anna Poletti
- “On the Lecture Circuit with Gertrude Stein’s Portraits” by Linda Zygutis
Plus book reviews and contributors.
Find the full text of the issue at Project MUSE
About the Journal
For over thirty years, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly has explored the theoretical, generic, historical, and cultural dimensions of life-writing.
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Submissions
Unsolicited manuscripts between 2,500 to 7,500 words are welcome. Email inquiries and editorial correspondence to [email protected].