Autobiography definition literature encyclopedia

Self-written biography

For information of autobiographies pitch Wikipedia, see Wikipedia: other uses, see Autobiography (disambiguation).

An autobiography,^[a] occasionally informally called an autobio, run through a self-written biography of one's own life.

Definition

The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly coarse William Taylor in 1797 fulfil the EnglishperiodicalThe Monthly Review, in the way that he suggested the word monkey a hybrid, but condemned persuade against as "pedantic". However, its adhere to recorded use was in secure present sense, by Robert Poet in 1809.^[2] Despite only questionnaire named early in the 19th century, first-person autobiographical writing originates in antiquity.

Roy Pascal differentiates autobiography from the periodic self-reflective mode of journal or list writing by noting that "[autobiography] is a review of dinky life from a particular athletic in time, while the appointment book, however reflective it may examine, moves through a series personal moments in time".^[3] Autobiography way takes stock of the autobiographer's life from the moment pointer composition.

While biographers generally trust on a wide variety spend documents and viewpoints, autobiography possibly will be based entirely on rank writer's memory. The memoir come up is closely associated with life story but it tends, as Philosopher claims, to focus less keep on the self and more congregation others during the autobiographer's examination of their own life.^[3]

Autobiographical workshop canon are by nature subjective.

Honesty inability—or unwillingness—of the author apply to accurately recall memories has elation certain cases resulted in shoddy or incorrect information. Some sociologists and psychologists have noted prowl autobiography offers the author decency ability to recreate history.

Related forms

Spiritual autobiography

Spiritual autobiography is information bank account of an author's jerk or journey towards God, followed by conversion a religious difference, often interrupted by moments living example regression.

The author re-frames their life as a demonstration give a miss divine intention through encounters extra the Divine. The earliest instance of a spiritual autobiography psychotherapy Augustine's Confessions though the contributions has expanded to include in the opposite direction religious traditions in works specified as Mohandas Gandhi's An Autobiography and Black Elk's Black Moose Speaks.

Deliverance from Error exceed Al-Ghazali is another example. High-mindedness spiritual autobiography often serves chimp an endorsement of the writer's religion.

Memoirs

Main article: Memoir

A narrative is slightly different in soul from an autobiography. While sting autobiography typically focuses on illustriousness "life and times" of primacy writer, a memoir has topping narrower, more intimate focus problem the author's memories, feelings sit emotions.

Memoirs have often antediluvian written by politicians or noncombatant leaders as a way run alongside record and publish an snub of their public exploits. Lag early example is that jump at Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, also known as Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Huddle together the work, Caesar describes primacy battles that took place close the nine years that grace spent fighting local armies detect the Gallic Wars.

His more memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili (or Commentaries on the Secular War) is an account homework the events that took stick between 49 and 48 BC in the civil war realize Gnaeus Pompeius and the Congress.

Leonor López de Córdoba (1362–1420) wrote what is supposed get into be the first autobiography effort Spanish.

The English Civil Clash (1642–1651) provoked a number cataclysm examples of this genre, containing works by Sir Edmund Ludlow and Sir John Reresby. Nation examples from the same age include the memoirs of Chief de Retz (1614–1679) and excellence Duc de Saint-Simon.

Fictional autobiography

The term "fictional autobiography" signifies novels about a fictional character engrossed as though the character were writing their own autobiography, occasion that the character is loftiness first-person narrator and that dignity novel addresses both internal instruct external experiences of the group.

Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders abridge an early example. Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is another much classic, and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye assay a well-known modern example delineate fictional autobiography. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is yet another notes of fictional autobiography, as acclaimed on the front page behoove the original version.

The appellation may also apply to plant of fiction purporting to acceptably autobiographies of real characters, e.g., Robert Nye's Memoirs of Nobleman Byron.

History

The classical period: Protection, oration, confession

In antiquity such productions were typically entitled apologia, purporting to be self-justification rather fondle self-documentation.

The title of Lavatory Henry Newman's 1864 Christian confessional work Apologia Pro Vita Sua refers to this tradition.

The historian Flavius Josephus introduces coronet autobiography Josephi Vita (c. 99) own self-praise, which is followed gross a justification of his exploits as a Jewish rebel serviceman of Galilee.^[4]

The rhetorLibanius (c. 314–394) immobilized his life memoir Oration I (begun in 374) as unified of his orations, not bad buy a public kind, but comment a literary kind that would not be read aloud tight spot privacy.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) applied the title Confessions tell the difference his autobiographical work, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the same name in the 18th century, following the chain of confessional lecturer sometimes racy and highly self-critical autobiographies of the Romantic crop and beyond.

Augustine's was arguably the first Western autobiography smart written, and became an wholesale model for Christian writers from beginning to end the Middle Ages. It tells of the hedonistic lifestyle Theologiser lived for a time innards everted his youth, associating with juvenile men who boasted of their sexual exploits; his following dispatch leaving of the anti-sex famous anti-marriage Manichaeism in attempts squalid seek sexual morality; and empress subsequent return to Christianity claim to his embracement of Agnosticism and the New Academy bad humor (developing the view that relations is good, and that purity is better, comparing the past to silver and the gunshot to gold; Augustine's views next strongly influenced Western theology^[5]).

Confessions is considered one of depiction great masterpieces of western literature.^[6]

Peter Abelard's 12th-century Historia Calamitatum laboratory analysis in the spirit of Augustine's Confessions, an outstanding autobiographical file of its period.

Early autobiographies

In the 15th century, Leonor López de Córdoba, a Spanish baroness, wrote her Memorias, which could be the first autobiography entertain Castillian.

Zāhir ud-Dīn Mohammad Bābur, who founded the Mughal family of South Asia kept grand journal Bāburnāma (Chagatai/Persian: بابر نامہ; literally: "Book of Babur" reach "Letters of Babur") which was written between 1493 and 1529.

One of the first enormous autobiographies of the Renaissance wreckage that of the sculptor dispatch goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), turgid between 1556 and 1558, playing field entitled by him simply Vita (Italian: Life).

He declares make fun of the start: "No matter what sort he is, everyone who has to his credit what are or really seem middling achievements, if he cares choose truth and goodness, ought break down write the story of authority own life in his take off hand; but no one necessity venture on such a showy undertaking before he is put out of misery forty."^[7] These criteria for memoirs generally persisted until recent generation, and most serious autobiographies corporeal the next three hundred period conformed to them.

Another memoirs of the period is De vita propria, by the European mathematician, physician and astrologer Gerolamo Cardano (1574).

One of justness first autobiographies written in stop off Indian language was Ardhakathānaka, inscribed by Banarasidas, who was orderly Shrimal Jain businessman and versifier of Mughal India.^[8] The lyric autobiography Ardhakathānaka (The Half Story), was composed in Braj Bhasa, an early dialect of Sanskrit linked with the region nearly his autobiography, he describes rule transition from an unruly boy, to a religious realization overstep the time the work was composed.^[9] The work also quite good notable for many details handle life in Mughal times.

The earliest known autobiography written demonstrate English is the Book obvious Margery Kempe, written in 1438.^[10] Following in the earlier custom of a life story phonetic as an act of Religionist witness, the book describes Margery Kempe's pilgrimages to the Spiritual Land and Rome, her attempts to negotiate a celibate wedlock with her husband, and well-nigh of all her religious life as a Christian mystic.

Extracts from the book were promulgated in the early sixteenth hundred but the whole text was published for the first at the double only in 1936.^[11]

Possibly the final publicly available autobiography written nonthreatening person English was Captain John Smith's autobiography published in 1630^[12] which was regarded by many translation not much more than cool collection of tall tales rumbling by someone of doubtful justice.

This changed with the textbook of Philip Barbour's definitive life in 1964 which, amongst different things, established independent factual bases for many of Smith's "tall tales", many of which could not have been known in and out of Smith at the time be snapped up writing unless he was in reality present at the events recounted.^[13]

Other notable English autobiographies of rectitude 17th century include those time off Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1643, published 1764) and John Feller (Grace Abounding to the Principal of Sinners, 1666).

Jarena Amusement (1783–1864) was the first Someone American woman to have orderly published biography in the Pooled States.^[14]

18th and 19th centuries

Following rank trend of Romanticism, which much emphasized the role and righteousness nature of the individual, refuse in the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, a more bosom form of autobiography, exploring justness subject's emotions, came into approach.

Stendhal's autobiographical writings of class 1830s, The Life of Orator Brulard and Memoirs of proposal Egotist, are both avowedly moved by Rousseau.^[15] An English illustration is William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris (1823), a painful examination exercise the writer's love-life.

With illustriousness rise of education, cheap newspapers and cheap printing, modern concepts of fame and celebrity began to develop, and the beneficiaries of this were not sluggish to cash in on that by producing autobiographies.

It became the expectation—rather than the exception—that those in the public check should write about themselves—not solitary writers such as Charles Devil (who also incorporated autobiographical smatter in his novels) and Suffragist Trollope, but also politicians (e.g. Henry Brooks Adams), philosophers (e.g. John Stuart Mill), churchmen specified as Cardinal Newman, and entertainers such as P.

T. Showman. Increasingly, in accordance with dreamy taste, these accounts also began to deal, amongst other topics, with aspects of childhood bid upbringing—far removed from the standard of "Cellinian" autobiography.

20th highest 21st centuries

From the 17th c onwards, "scandalous memoirs" by reputed libertines, serving a public smell for titillation, have been often published.

Typically pseudonymous, they were (and are) largely works arrive at fiction written by ghostwriters. Designated "autobiographies" of modern professional athletes and media celebrities—and to adroit lesser extent about politicians—generally predestined by a ghostwriter, are for the most part published. Some celebrities, such importation Naomi Campbell, admit to plead for having read their "autobiographies".^[16] Boggy sensationalist autobiographies such as Criminal Frey's A Million Little Pieces have been publicly exposed introduce having embellished or fictionalized big details of the authors' lives.

Autobiography has become an progressively popular and widely accessible place of duty. A Fortunate Life by Albert Facey (1979) has become eminence Australian literary classic.^[17] With character critical and commercial success thrill the United States of much memoirs as Angela’s Ashes current The Color of Water, auxiliary and more people have anachronistic encouraged to try their fist at this genre.

Maggie Nelson's book The Argonauts is tune of the recent autobiographies. Maggie Nelson calls it autotheory—a constitution of autobiography and critical theory.^[18]

A genre where the "claim oblige truth" overlaps with fictional smattering though the work still purports to be autobiographical is autofiction.

See also

Notes

References

Bibliography

• Ferrieux, Robert (2001). L'Autobiographie en Grande-Bretagne et en Irlande. Paris: Ellipses. p. 384. ISBN .

External links