Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice ed. by Marlene Kadar (review)

HUMANITIES 151 French realist Gustave Flaubert'; 'Longfellow's The Golden Legend (1851), a true Nativity play.' The bibliography of 'Rainbow' begins with D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature: why? Whatever the virtues of this book - and no doubt most of the articles are workmanlike to excellent - it has shortcomings. There is a considerable quantity of shoddy work, mostly transfer of material from other reference books carelessly and without first-hand examination. The obviousness of some of the errors - add Fefine at the Fair, '[Parleying] with George Bulib Dodington,' Vilette - suggests that no very long-term reader of Eng Lit took much hand in the checking, if checking there was. (A comparable, if smaller and more limited, recent project has been the Spenser Encyclopedia, also edited, at least in part, from an Ontario university: its Introduction describes its very thorough editorial procedures , and its list of 403 contributors is preceded by one of 364 scholars, equally respectable, who are thanked for advising and checking article drafts - a guarantee to the user that these editors are worthy guides and friends. It also has, bless its generous heart, a general bibliography and an index.) Moreover, comparing two of DBTEL's source texts, Ginzberg and Fulghum, with several articles has left me with the impression that the style in which each was used was, frequently, in different ways aimed more at giving an impression of capacious scholarship than at writing a useful article which author and editors could fully back up. Shall I, after all this, recommend DBTEL to that inquiring student? Well, probably: her Latin certainly extends to Caveat Emptor, and meantime there are the pleasures of Abel, Abraham, Absalom ... (JAY MACPHERSON) Marlene Kadar, editor. Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice University of Toronto Press 1992. 235. $45.00, $18.95 paper 'Like water, the shape of genres does not really exist, and their essence can never really be captured,' maintains York University humanities professor Marlene Kadar. This fluid image of genre is central to Kadar's own probing of life writing and is a useful concept with which to approach her edited collection Essays on Life Writing. An exploration of both theory and practice in life writing is long overdue. Given the impact on late twentieth-century literary criticism and theory of hermeneutics, postmodernism, feminism, reader-response theory, and psychoanalysis, it is no surprise that what Kadar calls 'the limited and limiting genres of [eighteenth century] biography and autobiography' which claim 'objective truth' and espouse 'narrative regularity' are ripe for reconsideration. Many of the contributors to Essays 152 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 on Life Writing favour contesting genre boundaries and widening definitions to include a proliferation of texts - especially women's texts such as letters, journals, diaries, oral narratives, anthropological life histories - even court records. From time to time in these essays, the theories of Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida , Julia Kristeva, Nicole Brossard, Helene Cixous, Catherine Clement, and M.M. Bakhtin are alluded to as bases for arguing that 'truthful' texts, like the 'self,' are constructions neither objectively nor subjectively homogeneous. Essays on Life Writing offers a politics of portraits. Ironically - given that this collection as a whole advocates the blurring of boundaries - Essays on Life Writing is laid out in four parts - a rigid and imposed structure that shapes somewhat uncomfortably an extremely disparate collection of essays. Kadar's introductory piece, 'Coming to Terms: Life Writing - from Genre to Critical Practice,' carefully identifies the issues involved in updating life writing to keep step with the evolution of politicat social, and literary movements. Part 1 consists of critical examinations of primary texts by literary women as alternatives to the strictures of eighteenth-century ideas about biography and autobiography: Elizabeth Smart's diaries and journals (by Alice van Wart), Marian Engel's cahiers and notebooks (by Christl Verduyn), Anna Jameson 's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (called an 'epistolary dijoumal' by Helen Buss), and Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters (called an 'epistolary novel' by Eleanor Ty). Part 2 includes three essays on nonliterary narratives: two on Italian Renaissance court records by Elizabeth S. Cohen and Thomas V. Cohen, and one on anthropological life...