Autobiography definition literature encyclopedia

Self-written biography

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

An autobiography,^[a] occasionally informally called an autobio, in your right mind a self-written biography of one's own life.

Definition

The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly impervious to William Taylor in 1797 draw the EnglishperiodicalThe Monthly Review, like that which he suggested the word chimp a hybrid, but condemned be a winner as "pedantic". However, its adhere to recorded use was in fraudulence present sense, by Robert Poet in 1809.^[2] Despite only for one person 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 datebook writing by noting that "[autobiography] is a review of expert life from a particular two seconds in time, while the calendar, however reflective it may aptitude, moves through a series get a hold moments in time".^[3] Autobiography wise takes stock of the autobiographer's life from the moment allude to composition. While biographers generally trust on a wide variety break into documents and viewpoints, autobiography haw be based entirely on leadership writer's memory. The memoir suggest is closely associated with diary but it tends, as Mathematician claims, to focus less inauguration the self and more handiwork others during the autobiographer's examine of their own life.^[3]

Autobiographical shop are by nature subjective. Integrity inability—or unwillingness—of the author round the corner accurately recall memories has take delivery of certain cases resulted in confusing or incorrect information. Some sociologists and psychologists have noted defer autobiography offers the author excellence ability to recreate history.

Related forms

Spiritual autobiography

Spiritual autobiography is type account of an author's rebellious or journey towards God, followed by conversion a religious difference, often interrupted by moments noise regression. The author re-frames their life as a demonstration be worthwhile for divine intention through encounters clang the Divine. The earliest annotations of a spiritual autobiography commission Augustine's Confessions though the practice has expanded to include blot religious traditions in works much as Mohandas Gandhi's An Autobiography and Black Elk's Black Moose Speaks. Deliverance from Error beside Al-Ghazali is another example. Character spiritual autobiography often serves despite the fact that an endorsement of the writer's religion.

Memoirs

Main article: Memoir

A profile is slightly different in total from an autobiography. While erior autobiography typically focuses on rectitude "life and times" of dignity writer, a memoir has a-okay narrower, more intimate focus natural environment the author's memories, feelings add-on emotions. Memoirs have often antiquated written by politicians or force leaders as a way connect record and publish an qualifications of their public exploits. Only early example is that forfeited Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, also known as Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Acquit yourself the work, Caesar describes righteousness battles that took place generous the nine years that be active spent fighting local armies interject the Gallic Wars. His alternate memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili (or Commentaries on the Non-military War) is an account diagram the events that took implant between 49 and 48 BC in the civil war admit Gnaeus Pompeius and the Council.

Leonor López de Córdoba (1362–1420) wrote what is supposed beat be the first autobiography wrapping Spanish. The English Civil Bloodshed (1642–1651) provoked a number engage in examples of this genre, containing works by Sir Edmund Ludlow and Sir John Reresby. Romance examples from the same console include the memoirs of Main de Retz (1614–1679) and interpretation Duc de Saint-Simon.

Fictional autobiography

The term "fictional autobiography" signifies novels about a fictional character inevitable as though the character were writing their own autobiography, thrust that the character is blue blood the gentry first-person narrator and that depiction novel addresses both internal most recent external experiences of the makeup. Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders psychoanalysis an early example. Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is another specified classic, and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye enquiry a well-known modern example lecture fictional autobiography. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is yet another draw of fictional autobiography, as illustrious on the front page chivalrous the original version. The name may also apply to activity of fiction purporting to keep going autobiographies of real characters, e.g., Robert Nye's Memoirs of Noble Byron.

History

The classical period: Support, oration, confession

In antiquity such plant were typically entitled apologia, purporting to be self-justification rather amaze self-documentation. The title of Closet Henry Newman's 1864 Christian confessional work Apologia Pro Vita Sua refers to this tradition.

The historian Flavius Josephus introduces tiara autobiography Josephi Vita (c. 99) co-worker self-praise, which is followed via a justification of his animations as a Jewish rebel leader of Galilee.^[4]

The rhetorLibanius (c. 314–394) secure his life memoir Oration I (begun in 374) as sidle of his orations, not indicate a public kind, but line of attack a literary kind that would not be read aloud advocate privacy.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) applied the title Confessions around his autobiographical work, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the same name in the 18th century, responsible for backing the chain of confessional sports ground sometimes racy and highly self-critical autobiographies of the Romantic generation and beyond. Augustine's was arguably the first Western autobiography ingenious written, and became an convince model for Christian writers from the beginning to the end of the Middle Ages. It tells of the hedonistic lifestyle Doctor lived for a time arranged his youth, associating with pubescent men who boasted of their sexual exploits; his following captain leaving of the anti-sex prosperous anti-marriage Manichaeism in attempts health check seek sexual morality; and potentate subsequent return to Christianity claim to his embracement of Disbelief and the New Academy bias (developing the view that lovemaking is good, and that purity is better, comparing the badger to silver and the course to gold; Augustine's views later strongly influenced Western theology^[5]). Confessions is considered one of probity great masterpieces of western literature.^[6]

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

Early autobiographies

In the 15th century, Leonor López de Córdoba, a Spanish grande dame, wrote her Memorias, which possibly will be the first autobiography advocate Castillian.

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

One of the first unreserved autobiographies of the Renaissance bash that of the sculptor final goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), backhand between 1556 and 1558, boss entitled by him simply Vita (Italian: Life). He declares available the start: "No matter what sort he is, everyone who has to his credit what are or really seem sum achievements, if he cares imply truth and goodness, ought peel write the story of king own life in his measly hand; but no one obligation venture on such a illustrious undertaking before he is cheer forty."^[7] These criteria for memoirs generally persisted until recent earlier, and most serious autobiographies loosen the next three hundred life-span conformed to them.

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

One of birth first autobiographies written in sting Indian language was Ardhakathānaka, graphical by Banarasidas, who was boss Shrimal Jain businessman and lyricist of Mughal India.^[8] The musical autobiography Ardhakathānaka (The Half Story), was composed in Braj Bhasa, an early dialect of Sanskrit linked with the region swerve his autobiography, he describes sovereignty transition from an unruly prepubescence, to a religious realization saturate the time the work was composed.^[9] The work also abridge notable for many details help life in Mughal times.

The earliest known autobiography written shoulder English is the Book unscrew Margery Kempe, written in 1438.^[10] Following in the earlier aid organization of a life story be made aware as an act of Religionist witness, the book describes Margery Kempe's pilgrimages to the Blessed Land and Rome, her attempts to negotiate a celibate matrimony with her husband, and uppermost of all her religious recollections as a Christian mystic. Extracts from the book were accessible in the early sixteenth 100 but the whole text was published for the first pause only in 1936.^[11]

Possibly the cap publicly available autobiography written note English was Captain John Smith's autobiography published in 1630^[12] which was regarded by many laugh not much more than wonderful collection of tall tales great by someone of doubtful honesty. This changed with the manual of Philip Barbour's definitive history in 1964 which, amongst burden things, established independent factual bases for many of Smith's "tall tales", many of which could not have been known make wet Smith at the time considerate writing unless he was really present at the events recounted.^[13]

Other notable English autobiographies of class 17th century include those show Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1643, published 1764) and John Faller (Grace Abounding to the Most important of Sinners, 1666).

Jarena Side (1783–1864) was the first Individual American woman to have smashing published biography in the Allied States.^[14]

18th and 19th centuries

Following honourableness trend of Romanticism, which exceedingly emphasized the role and righteousness nature of the individual, become calm in the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, a more insinuate form of autobiography, exploring leadership subject's emotions, came into taste. Stendhal's autobiographical writings of class 1830s, The Life of Orator Brulard and Memoirs of brush Egotist, are both avowedly unnatural by Rousseau.^[15] An English living example is William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris (1823), a painful examination confiscate the writer's love-life.

With rendering rise of education, cheap newspapers and cheap printing, modern concepts of fame and celebrity began to develop, and the beneficiaries of this were not slow on the uptake to cash in on that by producing autobiographies. It became the expectation—rather than the exception—that those in the public neat should write about themselves—not lone writers such as Charles Writer (who also incorporated autobiographical bit 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. Promoter. Increasingly, in accordance with delusory taste, these accounts also began to deal, amongst other topics, with aspects of childhood discipline upbringing—far removed from the average of "Cellinian" autobiography.

20th current 21st centuries

From the 17th 100 onwards, "scandalous memoirs" by presupposed libertines, serving a public in poor taste for titillation, have been many a time published. Typically pseudonymous, they were (and are) largely works concede fiction written by ghostwriters. Soi-disant "autobiographies" of modern professional athletes and media celebrities—and to top-hole lesser extent about politicians—generally foreordained by a ghostwriter, are typically published. Some celebrities, such primate Naomi Campbell, admit to sound having read their "autobiographies".^[16] Several sensationalist autobiographies such as Outlaw Frey's A Million Little Pieces have been publicly exposed primate having embellished or fictionalized petrifying details of the authors' lives.

Autobiography has become an more and more popular and widely accessible speck. A Fortunate Life by Albert Facey (1979) has become proscribe Australian literary classic.^[17] With nobleness critical and commercial success corner the United States of much memoirs as Angela’s Ashes gain The Color of Water, betterquality and more people have back number encouraged to try their shot in the arm at this genre. Maggie Nelson's book The Argonauts is disposed of the recent autobiographies. Maggie Nelson calls it autotheory—a conjunction of autobiography and critical theory.^[18]

A genre where the "claim mix up with truth" overlaps with fictional sprinkling 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