Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2004-2005

Yet, as students of many peoples and periods have found, trauma when it does happen—in individuals or groups—can be historically very revealing. Literally untold degrees of traumatization are suffered in silence, but when words are found to attempt to tell about extremely stressful occurrences, those words become vehicles that transport our understanding to the depths of human experience.

—Lynn A. Struve

Books

Alabi, Adetayo. Telling Our Stories: Continuities and Divergences in Black Autobiographies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Compares autobiographies by black writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the US.

Ansimov, Evgenii V. Five Empresses: Court Life in Eighteenth-Century Russia. Trans. Kathleen Carroll. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005.

Collective biography of Catherine I, Anna Ioannovna, Anna Leopoldovna, Elizabeth, and Catherine the Great.

Aram, Bethany. Juana the Mad: Sovereignty and Dynasty in Renaissance Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.

Provides an analysis of female royal authority through Juana's strategies for ensuring her children's succession and the growth of the Hapsburg Dynasty.

Auerbach, Emily. Searching for Jane Austen. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2005.

Recuperates Austen from two centuries of editing, censorship, and distortion.

Axelrod, David. Troubled Intimacies: A Life in the Interior West. Corvallis:Orgeon State UP, 2004.

Axelrod explores his personal life in the West while confronting "hard questions about the relationship between humans and the western landscape."

Baer, Ulrich. Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge: MIT P, 2005.

Connects the experience of trauma—moments arrested experientially by traumatized psyches—and photographic images—moments arrested mechanically.

Bainbrigge, Susan. Writing against Death: The Autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005.

As de Beauvoir evaluated and reevaluated her life, she was able to negotiate questions about death, dying, and mortality.

Barancik, Sue. Guide to Collective Biographies for Children and Young Adults. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2005.

Lists over 700 collective biographies for children and young adults, with title, subject, and biographee indexes.

Bartow, Joanna R. Subject to Change: The Lessons of Latin American Women's "Testimonio" for Truth, Fiction, and Theory. Durham: U of North Carolina P, 2005.

Focuses on the medium's relationship to testimonial content in work by Diamela Eltit, Carolina María de Jesus, Clarice Lispector, Rigoberta Menchú, and Elena Poniatowska.

Benchouiha, Lucie. Primo Levi: Rewriting the Holocaust. Leicester: Troubador, 2005.

Assesses the thematic, stylistic, and linguistic echoes of Levi's concentration camp testimony across his oeuvre.

Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.

Analyzes visual art produced in the context of conflict and trauma to show how art contributes to a new understanding of trauma and loss.

Bennett, Michael. Democratic Discourses: The Radical Abolition Movement and Antebellum American Literature. Piscataway: Rutgers UP, 2005.

Paired authors Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller and Sojourner Truth, and Frances Ellen Harper and Walt Whitman show how black and white literature interacted in creating and practicing democracy.

Berger, Silvia. Cuatro textos autobiográficos latinoamericanos: Yo, historia e identidad nacional en A. Gerchunoff, M. Agosín, A. Bioy Casares y O. Soriano. New York: Peter Lang, 2004.

Compares constructions of self and nation in works by Alberto Gerchunoff, Marjorie Agosin, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Osvaldo Soriano.

Bernstein, Gail Lee. Isami's House: Three Centuries of a Japanese Family. Berkeley:U of California P, 2005.

Emphasizes social/cultural history in this chronicle of a family whose rise, decline, and eventual rebuilding seem to parallel Japan's.

Blotner,Joseph. An Unexpected Life. Baton Rouge:Lousiana State UP, 2005.

A writer of literary lives finds that it's very difficult to write one's own life, since one needs almost "a kind of double vision" to reproduce the sense of a thing as it was happening while supplying the hindsight that comes with reflecting upon the past.

Boehmer, Elleke. Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan/Manchester UP, 2005.

Essays on male...