Psychology and Historical Interpretation, and: Life Histories and Psychobiography (review)

332 biography Vol. 12, No. 4 the empirical experiences of the reader." Nadel covers some interesting ground before concluding with the by now familiar point that life-writer and novelist "are both creative writers whose points of contact are language, fictional paradigm and narrative form." Evelyn J. Hinz in the introduction offers a consciously provocative thesis, suggesting that the production of a poetics of life-writing has been hobbled by the "tendency to liken it to prose fiction when in fact it is drama that provides the most appropriate generic touchstone." There is not room in a short review to engage with Hinz's arguments as they deserve, but they seem to me to be frequently tendentious and stretched well beyond the point at which what is referred to as an 'analogy' collapses. Among other arguments, Hinz discriminates the nature of mimesis in novel and drama: "however 'realistic' a novel might be, factual fidelity is not a criterion ... what is imitated in the novel is not something that has actually happened," the claim that it did is just "an esthetic strategy," whereas in drama there is "a sense that something empirically real is being imitated." I cannot see that novels which make use of the "esthetic strategy" of historical fidelity have any less "a sense" of the "real" than drama. Hinz's conclusions seem to me to depend on a reductive interpretation of mimesis and to require untenable special pleading for a privileged status for drama to sustain them. But no doubt the editor is trying deliberately to stimulate debate, and indeed it would be useful to arrive at a consensus about how far these analogies, whether with narrative or drama, really are useful. In the most stimulating essay in the collection, Philip Dodd takes up the life-writing-as-fiction question which Nadel and Hinz deal with, and makes of it a sustained engagement with the issue of the world and the text. Dodd traces the "gadarene rush by critics to prove that autobiography [and indeed biography] is fictive" to both Deconstructionist and New Critical attitudes: "my charge against autobiography-as-fiction ... is that autobiography becomes a safe and reserved space in which the harried self is released from the demands of history to become the product either of art (conservative version) or textuality (radical version)." Taking Ronald Fraser's In Search of a Past as a praiseworthy attempt to engage with the problems in practice, Dodd argues for a style of autobiography which would recapture history and not relegate it to some textual or fictional realm. He sums up with a quote from Richard Johnson to the effect that now all historical writing will need to engage with this issue, " 'examining particular histories and situation, but "doing theory" all the time.' " Life-writing needs to do just this; to write not fiction but history; and to achieve this it needs to be "doing theory" all the time. Despite my reservations the collection is one that scholars will want to consult, both for its pieces on life-writing and for those which use life-writing documents. It is not, however, a collection whose theme is properly described as "aspects" of the genre. David Peters Corbett Wolverhampton Polytechnic Runyan, William McKinley, ed. Psychology and Historical Interpretation. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. xiii & 306. $24.95 (hardcover), $12.95 (paper). Runyan, William McKinley. Life Histories and Psychobiography. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. $19.95. Paperback edition, 1984. $10.95. Pp. xiii & 289. REVIEWS 333 Some seven years ago, Stanford University sponsored a conference on "History and Psychology," with a distinguished roster of participants from both disciplines as well as a sprinkling of literary people and psychoanalysts. The psychologist William Runyan from the University of California, Berkeley, was subsequently entrusted with preparing the proceedings of this symposium for publication. Wisely, Runyan did more than edit the conference papers—he transformed the entire effort into a cohesive book by writing an Introduction (on the historical and conceptual background of "psychohistory") and a concluding section (reconceptualizing the relationship between the two disciplines) which, taken together, add up to more than a third of the resulting volume. Runyan's painstaking work...