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The first four essays review the major historical periods of American autobiography, placing the classic texts of American autobiographical literature from Captain John Smith to Malcolm X in the illuminating context of lesser-known contemporary narratives.  Daniel B. Shea writes on colonial America, Lawrence Buell on the American Renaissance, Susanna Egan on the years after the Civil War, and Albert E. Stone on the twentieth century.
    The second part of American Autobiography  shows the diversity of voices, forms, audiences, and modes of identity in the literature of American autobiography.  Provocative essays by William Boelhower and Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong on immigrant autobiography discuss the changes in the sense of self that occur when strangers come to a strange land.  Arnold Krupat writes about how American Indians conceptualize the self and about the relationship between oral and written discourse.  William L. Andrews evaluates the strong body of critical theory that has grown up around African-American autobiography, showing how both the genre and its criticism have responded to contemporary historical pressures.  Carol Holly explores the model of personal identity that underlies nineteenth-century women’s autobiographies, and Blanche Gelfant examines the narrative and political strategies of Emma Goldman’s autobiography, especially her use of popular romance and melodrama. 
    The last essay offers a more personal perspective on contemporary autobiography:  a “dialogue” between Robert and Jane Coles about how they developed their method of eliciting first-person oral narratives for their famous Children of Crisis and Women of Crisis series.
    These essays raise  theoretical issues that are examined in Paul John Eakin’s incisive introduction:  How do we define a literary genre of protean shape and perplexing cultural multiplicity?  How do we approach the special problems created by documents that are both historical and literary texts, ones that pose difficult questions about truth and representation?  Most important, how is the canon of American autobiography to be constructed, and how is its history to be written?  Tracing that critical history, Eakin explains how changing ideas about “the mainstream” and “the marginal” have revitalized our retrospective view of American autobiography and opened up new and exciting prospects for today’s reader.

This collection of essays written from 1947-1986 by Fei Hsiao-tung, China's most distinguished sociologist and anthropologist, presents a rich and representative sampling of the research that has characterized his long career. In 1936, Fei conducted field work in Kaixian'gong, a village in Jiangsu province in east China. This village became the subject of his now classic study Peasant Life in China, in which he argued that, because of China's huge population and the scarcity of cultivable land, household industries such as production of raw silk were vital to the peasants' economic survival. His conclusions, long rejected by China's policymakers, have recently been embraced by the government under the political leadership of Deng Xiaopeng.

Returning to Kaixian'gong in 1957 and again in the 1980s, Fei examined the changes that had occurred since his initial research. Three essays that resulted from these follow-up studies are included in this collection, providing a rare summary and analysis of developments in the village between 1936 and 1986. Also included here are four articles based on Fei's 1983-84 research in other areas of Jiangsu province. His explorations of the contrast between the wealth of southern Jiangsu and the long-standing poverty of the northern half of the province address key issues of public policy in China today. Useful to students of rural sociology as well as of Chinese history, politics, economics, and anthropology, this collection will provide an overview not only of developments in the small towns of China but also of Fei's thought.

Four hundred years after his death on a Dutch battlefield, Sir Philip Sidney is being honored with international conferences across the United States and in Europe. One of the three master writers of the English Renaissance along with Shakespeare and Spenser, Sidney gave to his own time the first sonnet sequence in English and the best English defense of poetry ever written. His book Arcadia—the first novel in English—was the best-selling English novel for two hundred years. In our own time he is seen, unlike his contemporaries, as a writer whose political life at Elizabeth's court and whose diplomatic and religious ties to the leading rulers of Europe make the interrelationship of his work and his culture singularly important in the present reassessment of his age.

Sidney in Retrospect, a special quatercentenary volume, brings together for the first time the landmark essays from English Literary Renaissance that reinterpret the significance of his life and reassess all of his major work. In addition, two newly discovered letters appear in book form for the first time.