Special Section Special Section: Shakespeare Biography Comparative Biography Theory Study Text Study Autobiography Studies Subject Studies History of Life Writing Film Biography Book Reviews Workshop Academic Info More
From the Editor

The articles in this issue covers a great variety of topics and many of them directly or indirectly explore the topic of truth and fiction in life writing. Yang Zhengrun’s “Shakespeare’s Biography: Subverting the Traditional Discourse” elaborates on the subversion of the traditional discourse in Shakespeare’s biography in recent two decades, with Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare as the particular case, as it is based on imagination and undermines the life-writing principle of “non-fiction.” This leads to a heated discussion. The American biographer Jonathan Sperber argues, in our interview with him, for a strict historical standard for life writing. Sperber believes that fictional works “should be labeled as such. Non-fiction biography should stick to explication of empirically available documentation of a person’s life. ” This Pulitzer finalist biographer insists on the non-fiction precept of biography. In the special section of Shakespeare’s biography, this topic manifests in Mu Baoqing’s discussion of sentimentality and literary narrative in contemporary Shakespeare’s biography and Xu Qinchao’s examination of Peter Ackroyd’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s dramas from the perspectives of space theory.


The two articles on comparative biography both analyze how biographers’ explication of the same event in the same subject’s life varies, sometimes diversely. Liu Ping focuses on the love affair between the well-known modern Chinese novelist Zhang Ailing and the writer Hu Lancheng by comparing three of Zhang biography and her autobiographical novel to discover different notes of narrations for this issue, i.e. some are regretful, some delightful and some resentful. Mao Xu targets at the famous case of Mia Farrow v.s. Woody Allen, in which director Woody was charged by Mia on sexual assaults. Mao selects four works for comparison: Mia’s memoir/indictment and three of Woody’s biography. Such kind of comparative reading is fascinating and enlightening. It is therefore arguably well accepted by readers.


Wang Jun’s “Writing Biographies for China and Her People” sheds a new light on the debate over Chinese national character. Lin Yutang’s My Country and My People represents the Chinese and Chinese culture as happy, natural and humorous in a positive manner as an effective solution to the West’s problem, thus totally contrasting with Lu Xun’s criticism of Chinese national character. What interests us is Wang’s treatment of this work as a collective biography of the Chinese people. The notion of biographical subject is continually broadening, even from individuals or collectives to objects. We will touch upon this topic in future issues. Any views are welcomed to the discussion.


“The ‘Odd’ Professor in the Dialogue between Poetry and Philosophy” by Liang Qingbiao is a study of Ravelstein, a mock biography of the well-known philosopher Allan Bloom by the well-renowned novelist Saul Bellow. Liang clarifies the inherent logic in this biography. To explore Allan Bloom’s personality and thinking, Saul Bellow starts from the “odd” spanning from Bloom’s pursuit of food and sex, to his political and philosophical thinking and to the final confrontation with death. In this fashion, Bellow completes a dialogue between poetics and philosophy tinged with autobiographical elements. Liang’s interpretation of this debatable and opaque work manifests a research style of his own. 


Most of articles we receive for this issue fall under the section of Autobiography Study, from which we select three. Wang Weisheng and Zou Guangsheng analyze Lu Xun in his collection of essays Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk from autobiographical perspectives in an attempt to reveal the multiplicity and contradiction of the subject’s character and to examine how Lu Xun’s character evolved from childhood, adolescence, youth to middle adulthood. Autobiographers ought to tell truth and yet they differ in their boundaries of truth-telling. Han Bin examines three contemporary Chinese celebrities to see their attitudes toward truth-seeking in their autobiographies. Wang Meng values truth above anything else and so discloses his family scandal; Xia Yan prefers privacy to truthfulness. As the result, he praises the good while hiding the wrong; Zhou Zuoren regards the selection of what to tell is a justified right and keeps silent on some important but shameful facts. All these indicate the complexity of autobiographical truth. In her theoretical research on autobiography, Wang Cong discovers that autobiography bears healing function for trauma. Similarly, psychoanalysis theorists have proposed the function of catharsis for mental illness treatment, but they believe this process takes place in unconsciousness. Wang’s research arguably complements the psychoanalysis theory.


In the section of Subject Study, Wang Wei and Yang Lixin investigate the relationship between Virginia Woolf and “the Bloomsbury group”, analyzing the influence on her by some crucial members. Zhu Hongtao reviews the Chinese historian Gu Jiegang who claims the notion of integrating the Old with the New in the New Culture Movement. Both Woolf and Gu are culturally important in the twentieth century. The two essays cite rich or even unnoticed materials, conducive to a better understanding of the subjects.


It is imperative to boost research on history of life writing. Wang Hongbo’s “The Permanent Pursuit and Long Journey” summarizes the biography of Hu Shi and the practitioner Hu Shi’s own biographies for nearly a century from the perspective of communication studies. He analyzes the continual process of how Hu’s life has been written. To the extent that Hu has made unparalleled contributions to modern Chinese life writing, the facts provided in this study give impetus to the study of Hu Shi. It is proved in Huang Rong’s “A Study of the Development of English Obituary” that English obituary not only boasts a history of 400 years, but also is evolving in functions and value with the social development, manifesting different characters in forms and contents over time. Moreover, there is room for study of obituary as a form of life writing.  


The issue of ethical values is among the core elements of biography evaluation. It is rather complicated in the case of film biography. Li Meimin, by exploiting the perspctive of narrative ethics, criticizes the epic film Gandhi for leaving some historical facts obscure and highlighting those legitimized events which render strongly the western values and ideology. Though such an analysis sounds reasonable, it should be noted that ignoring major historical events is ubiquitous in film biography. This is attributable to factors in ideology, art, or technique. The violation of the narrative ethics can not be apart from specific circumstances.


The combination of life writing with other disciplines, in particular psychology, has resulted in marvelous exuberance of life writing since the twentieth century, while the current combination with Ecology is a new dynamic. Ecology and Life Writing is a collection consisting of scholarly articles on life writing. In her book review, Li Tianqi quotes and comments on some interesting views, such as the comparison of autobiography writing with the building of Chinese gardens, whether the scope of biographical subjects may be extended beyond humankind, and how some Chinese scholars analyse autobiography of Wang Meng or Shen Congwen from the Ecological perspective. These articles are all illuminating to researchers.


Kate Douglas’s research interest is adolescent life writing. She shares in “‘Share the Shame’: Curating the Childhood Self in Mortified Nation!” her team work with other scholars in accordance with the concept of ante-autobiography. These efforts are designed to preserve the childhood self as a symbol of identity by collecting the adults’ adolescent diaries, pictures, letters, school archives and social website entries. Given the fact that adolescent education has become one of world’s increasingly pressing issues, this is an innovative autobiographical experiment. We look forward to their experience shared in the future.


“Life Writing and Literature: the Trans-Cultural and Interdisciplinary Era” is a high-level forum and an important academic event in Chinese life writing community in 2017. Zhao Shankui’s conference report is a window to the event. From this window one can see the vista from the Chinese scholars in life writing studies. While garnering much information, life writing scholars can also discover therein topics worthy for serious consideration.