Proceeding from a March 2008 workshop at the University of Sheffield, this welcome collection of essays brings a variety of approaches to important questions raised by the increasing prominence of life-writing texts within interdisciplinary scholarship on historical and contemporary China, demonstrating that such texts characteristically demand informed, nuanced and theoretically astute readings. Indicative of the huge range and the complex dynamics of individual auto/biographical texts in relation to the conditions of their production over the past four centuries, the volume encompasses modern Tibetan autobiography alongside writings of and about imperial-era literati and modern Chinese citizens. It makes a timely contribution of China-focussed material to the steadily increasing attention paid to life-writing theory and practice across a range of humanities disciplines.

As Marjorie Dryburgh's introduction reminds us, life writing symptomatically involves tensions between the life as lived and the life as written, particularly when strong generic conventions operate, as with the hegemonic tradition of chuan or official biographies in imperial China. Yet, as charted in Dryburgh and Sarah Dauncey's landmark chapter “Chinese life writing: themes and variations,” and further evidenced in the chapters that follow, such conventions should not be seen as fixed. While powerful interests in China before and since 1600 have asserted authority over how and which lives were publically written, orthodoxies are not always observed even by the most apparently orthodox texts, and non-official forms from poetry to contemporary blogs may also incorporate life narrative in ways very different from more rule-bound biographical genres. Further, as the collection convincingly demonstrates, hermeneutical approaches highlighting gaps, silences and deviations can actively reveal the complex ways in which power operates within life-writing practices, rather than simply taking this as read. The book's introduction and first chapter, which in themselves will serve as invaluable theoretical and factual resources for scholars or students seeking to engage with the vast terrain of Chinese life writing, make stimulating thematic connections between the disparate historical moments discussed in the chapters that follow. Of these, two chapters relate to biographical subjects born before 1850, while the remaining essays focus largely or wholly on writings of the 20th century, with Dauncey's discussion of disabled writer Zhang Haidi (b. 1955) bringing us up to the present through Zhang's ongoing self-narration in cyberspace.

Contradictions between official and alternative life writing forms are the subject of Alison Hardie's discussion of Ruan Dacheng (1587–1646), who was known as a “treacherous official” from the Ming History that emerged after his death (as well as from his negative portrayal in sources such as the later play The Peach-blossom Fan), yet was projected more positively, through various guises, in the well-known poems and dramas that Ruan himself composed and staged. Hardie admits that Ruan appears from many accounts to have been irritatingly precocious, arrogant and lacking in self-awareness, yet argues pertinently that the agenda of biographers and autobiographers alike must always be interrogated. Suspicion of biographers' predilections also emerges from Harriet Zurndorfer's questioning of May Fourth era neglect of the significance of female scholar Wang Zhaoyuan (1763–1851). Not only did Liang Qichao and Hu Shi, seen as pioneers of modern Chinese biography, dismiss “cainü” (“talented women”) of the Qing dynasty as signs of imperial China's effete lack of masculine prowess in the modern world; these writers also, when later positively reappraising Qing scholars' “evidential research” as part of China's native “scientific tradition,” overlooked Wang's own considerable contribution to this movement, a contribution which, ironically, had been recognised in traditional sources.

Diaries are the focus of two particularly illuminating chapters in the collection. Dryburgh's essay “The fugitive self” pinpoints how, over five decades, the diary of politician Zheng Xiaoxu (1860–1938), best known for his collaborationist role as premier of Manzhouguo in his later years, reveals Zheng's sense of incapacity, perhaps unsurprising, but no less poignant, to live up to the moral ideals of his education as a Confucian official. The self that Zheng writes is a dutiful one that elides yet often fails to conceal private disappointments. Chloe Starr meanwhile finds profound meaning in the necessary silences of the diaries of Zhang Xianliang (b.1936), largely written in labour camps and therefore heavily constrained and elliptical as the self is formed and reformed by the state. Zhang's later novels connect with the diaries through what Starr appositely calls “recensions of the self,” expanding on the traumas of the author's own past, yet unable to present the self as other than “fluid” and “fractured.”

Deviations of various kinds from norms of modern state-sanctioned life-writing discourse are explored in the remaining chapters of the collection as further mediations of selfhood. Nicola Spakowski's essay on the autobiographical writing of political women's experiences of revolutionary struggle reveals how even in writings prompted by state imperatives, narration of personal tragedies such as a miscarriage may powerfully confound the normative framework of the political victory narrative, albeit in muted ways. Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy's meticulous mapping of genre within Tibetan auto/biography, and her detailed examination of two recent works published in Chinese, shows how such texts negotiate complex questions of political and genealogical allegiance. Finally, Dauncey's discussion of Zhang Haidi, valuably contextualised in terms of shifting state approaches to selecting exemplary figures for public consumption (in particular, from the able-bodied, such as Lei Feng, to disabled figures such as Zhang), explores the marked turn to the personal in Zhang's self-representation as her embrace of internet-enabled forms such as blogs has superseded her reliance on more state-controlled media.

Life writing is a notably elastic category, yet Writing Lives in China brings rigour and insight to the breadth of issues raised by its growing visibility in Chinese textual studies. It makes original and significant contributions to theorising scholarly and critical approaches to such texts; especially useful is reference to recent Chinese scholarship. Overall, the collection provides multiple points of departure for further research on, and teaching of, the significance of auto/biographical material in Chinese interdisciplinary work.