Review: Gabriele Griffin, ed. Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian Writing. London: Routledge, 2002.

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: It is an open secret that the biographical guide or dictionary is the most intertextual genre of all academic writing - and the least acknowledged to be so. Looking up individual entries in several dictionaries (possibly in the course of researching for a 'new' biographical abstract oneself?), one encounters very often one and the same portrait of a writer. Editing and compiling a biographical guide neither seems to be a very original task nor do existing articles on individual authors, unlike book-length biographies or studies, seem to enjoy something like a copyright - they are common academic knowledge. Of course there is only so much one can present within a limited space and most of this space is taken up by the presentation of unchanging factual knowledge such as birth dates, education, publications, maybe suggestions for secondary reading. However, a foray into several lexica and dictionaries should ideally be rewarded by a more differentiated portrait of the person one is in quest of, not just slightly differing versions of the same.