The three veteran biographers that we interviewed in this issue are well-known among Chinese readers: Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin whose co-authored biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer won the Pulitzer Prize and had its Chinese version; Carl Rollyson who sees the Chinese version of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon authored by him and his wife. Readers of this issue will definitely benefit from their talk. They all touch upon the issues such as the relationship of biography with biopics, pointing out the differences between the two genres which compete with each other while stimulating each other Their points of view will be extended, we hope, to the international conference “Life Writing and Film Biography in the Trans-Cultural Context” to be hosted in October this year by the Center for Life Writing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

The theory of life writing calls for creativity. For theories, no creativity, no vitality. Some papers are worth noticing for this point. Liang Qingbiao puts forth a concept “the style of late narration in autobiography”. He argues that certain autobiographers bear similar writing styles in their late lives. One of such important features is irony, which plays multiple roles in the autobiographical narration. A close examination of this kind of irony may help penetrate the psychological depth of the autobiography. Liang’s concept draws from Edward Said’s “late style” theory. This again confirms the truth that the thriving theory of auto/biography relies on other disciplines for their development.

That one of the drives giving birth to earliest biography is “the impulse to commemorate” is common sense in life writing studies. “Mourning and Life Writing in the West” by Tian Yan and Yin Dexiang studies works of many genres along the history of biography in the West. By investigating the discourse of condolence, their patterns of narration and their cultural values, the paper contributes felicitously to the notion of “impulse to commemorate”.  

Three articles on pedagogy appear in the section of Autobiography Study. Shen Chen examines the family memoir, Feng Yuzhi traces “double narratives” that autobiography and biography converge in the same text, and Zhu Chunfa explores the meaning of spatial narrative. The three studies, though focusing on text study, bear a striking feature with broader perspectives.

The Chinese scholars have shown concern on biography in the West and made substantial proper studies for almost a hundred years. We should, however, not neglect our Asian neighbors. Ever since the Journal of Modern Life Writing Studies was launched, we have published studies on Asian biography. This issue goes on to assemble three more articles in the field. Biography in Singapore is not given adequate attention so far in the global academia. Deborah Chiong’s paper presents, with  a full account of and appraisement of Lien Shih Sheng, Singapore’s first professional biographer. What draws our special attention is that this biographer, who came from China and wrote in Chinese, distinguished his biography with Singaporean milieu and salient features of Singaporean biography which differentiates entirely from the Chinese one.

Yuan Qi’s essay examines the Japanese biographer Tennan Tahara's Yuan Shikai, the subject being a pivot figure in politics of the late Qing Dynasty, China. Understandably Yuan Shikai is a colossus that historians and readers pay special attention to. What makes the case even more intriguing is how, after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, the Japanese people looked at Yuan Shikai against the backdrop of severe conflicts in the Japan-China relations. With his study of Tennan Tahara’s political stand, his point of views and writing techniques, Yuan Qi reveals a Japanese perspective of evaluating Yuan Shikai. Chen Lingling’s essay sorts out Japanese children’s biography, an important sub-genre, in the period from the Meiji Restoration down to the end of World War II, whereby certain characters of Japanese culture are evidenced out of the study.

The subject of the biography is a significant issue in the study of life writing. The subject study is also one of the section in which we receive most papers. This section in this issue features five essays, three of which address the renowned subjects: Zhao Lingling makes a meticulous examination of the respectable Chinese scholar Qian Zhongshu, focusing on his change from a writer to a scholar around the 1950s. Chen Ruihong explores John Newman’s conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism. And Zhang Zhichao analyzes how the Catholic Church influences James Joyce’s life. All the three papers set out their research from the unnoticed details in those subjects’ lives and deepen our knowledge of those subjects by a new interpretation and a full study. Another two papers touch upon historical figures dug out from age-old archives. Xu Xiaohong provides a study of the Chinese psychopathologist Lieh Tao, who returned from Japan and died prematurely. Liu Jialin’s article traces the life of the Chinese American actress Huang Liushuang who was active in the American and European cinema. The two subjects, though obsolete today, should not be left behind our memory. They had notable impacts in their own fields at their time, not to mention that their lives and experiences may maintain valuable materials for life writing studies.

In the past thirty years, Vladimir Nabokov has attracted continuous attention in the Chinese academia and among biography scholars, a phenomenon that propels us into setting up a section exclusive to the study of Nobokov. Two essays by young scholars make detailed analyses and interpretations on the subject, though through different lens. Hou Wanling’s “Writing the Self Artistically” discusses Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory, whereas Cao Jiao’s “Weaving the Pattern of Life” reviews scholastically Brian Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov. The former proves that Nobokov transforms his own life into a piece of art by way of reconstructing his memory and dispelling conventional ethics; the latter attempts to illustrate how a Russian noble youth is forced into exile and later becomes an American novelist. Also the paper explores the thoughts and feelings that Nabokov’s art pattern contains. The perspectives that the two essays adopt, either from the work to the novelist, or from the novelist to the work, are important paths for the study of literary biography.

One of the aim to set up this journal is, through biography study, to provide theoretical support for life writing. It is of great necessity to establish life writing programme at universities if we hope that biography prosper. Such programme is called “non-fiction creative writing” in the USA, the most prestigious one being in Columbia University. A biographer herself, Fu Jiani has had written quite some Chinese biographies. She pursued this programme in Columbia University two years ago. At our invitation Fu presents an essay, recounting her living history studying life writing at the university. Those professors’ teaching styles, especially workshops, in her account are good teaching pedagogy for us to notice and model on.

The writing experiences of Chinese biographers also merit our attention. It is a widely-accepted notion that the biography subject should be properly determined, first-hand materials should be collected as far as possible, materials should go through a keen process of scrutinizing and differentiating, the narrative should not eulogize, or conceal. Yet in the real-life context of our culture and tradition, it is easier said than done. Pang Ruiyin, a senior biographer, informs us of how he cracks the hard nut in his extensive writing experience. His essay will lead us into the understanding of a biographer’s toil and gaining something out of it.