Biography, vol. 24, no. 2 (Spring 2001)
Editor’s Note, iv
ARTICLES
Philip Holden
A Man and an Island: Gender and Nation in Lee Kuan Yew’s The Singapore Story, 401
Lee Kuan Yew’s The Singapore Story is a "national autobiography" which, like many similar works written during or after decolonization, attempts to interpellate readers as self-disciplined citizen-subjects. Drawing parallels between Singapore’s emergence as a nation and the training of a rugged, individual male body, Lee’s memoirs are nonetheless highly relational in the construction of their autobiographical subject, haunted by the contradictory demands of individual and community, capital and nation.
Kathleen J. Waites
Framing the Framed Self: A Reading of Victor Nunez’s Ruby in Paradise, 425
"Framing the Framed Self" combines auto/biographical theory and feminist film theory to examine the contested subjectivity of the diary-writing, unconventional female protagonist, Ruby Lee Gissing, of Victor Nunez’s film Ruby in Paradise. Gissing narrates the film via her diary, even as she attempts to "write" her own life, ironically within the male director’s alternative cinematic framing. The director employs cinematic devices that challenge the aesthetic mechanisms of conventional film, and thus its ideological underpinnings as well, thereby creating a suitable frame for the young woman, who attempts to "construct" an authentic identity in a world of preconstructed meanings.
Carl Rollyson
Samuel Johnson: Dean of Contemporary Biographers, 442
Drawing on his experiences as a biographer of Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Rebecca West, and Marilyn Monroe, Carl Rollyson suggests that Johnson’s description of biography in The Rambler, No. 60 is still far ahead of what biographers and many of their critics conceive of as biography.
REVIEWS
Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography, by Susanna Egan, 448
Reviewed by Marie Lovrod
Old Wives’ Tales and Other Women’s Stories, by Tania Modleski, 451
Reviewed by Pamela Caughie
Women’s Lives: The View from the Threshold, by Carolyn G. Heilbrun, 453
Reviewed by Nancy A. Walker
Women’s Lives into Print: The Theory, Practice and Writing of Feminist Auto/Biography, edited by Pauline Polkey, 458
Reviewed by Linda Wagner-Martin
Telling Bodies, Performing Birth, by Della Pollock, 460
Reviewed by Lynda Birke and Consuelo Rivera
Genius Explained, by Michael J. A. Howe, 465
Reviewed by Seth Surgan
Storylines: Craftartists’ Narratives of Identity, by Elliot G. Mishler, 470
Reviewed by Elizabeth Tonkin
Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600–1945, edited by Rebecca Earle, 472
Reviewed by Thomas O. Beebee
Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property, by Kevin Hart, 474
Reviewed by Stephen D. Scherwatzky
Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina Viscountess Hawarden, by Carol Mavor; and
Clementina, Lady Hawarden: Studies from Life, 1857–1864, by Virginia Dodier, 477
Reviewed by Julie F. Codell
Constructions of Colonialism: Perspectives on Eliza Fraser’s Shipwreck, edited by Ian J. McNiven, Lynette Russell, and Kay Schaffer, 484
Reviewed by Anette Bremer
Shameful Autobiographies: Shame in Contemporary Australian Autobiographies and Culture, by Rosamund Dalziell, 487
Reviewed by Gillian Whitlock
Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention, by Carolyn Hamilton, 491
Reviewed by James Burns
Women of the Dawn, by Bunny McBride, 493
Reviewed by Theda Perdue
If This House Could Talk ... Historic Homes, Extraordinary Americans, by Elizabeth Smith Brownstein, 495
Reviewed by Andrea Tuttle Kornbluh
Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend: The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction, by James T. Jones, 499
Reviewed by Robert Holton
REVIEWED ELSEWHERE, 502
Excerpts from recent reviews of biographies, autobiographies, and other works of interest
LIFELINES, 543
Upcoming events, calls for papers, and news from the field
CONTRIBUTORS, 549
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