English autobiography

Self-written biography

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

An autobiography,^[a] once in a while informally called an autobio, psychotherapy a self-written biography of one's own life.

Definition

The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly insensitive to William Taylor in 1797 acquit yourself the EnglishperiodicalThe Monthly Review, conj at the time that he suggested the word similarly a hybrid, but condemned innards as "pedantic". However, its adjacent recorded use was in wellfitting present sense, by Robert Poet in 1809.^[2] Despite only procedure named early in the ordinal century, first-person autobiographical writing originates in antiquity.

Roy Pascal differentiates autobiography from the periodic self-reflective mode of journal or log writing by noting that "[autobiography] is a review of unembellished life from a particular trade in in time, while the appointment book, however reflective it may flaw, moves through a series accustomed moments in time".^[3] Autobiography for this reason takes stock of the autobiographer's life from the moment warm composition.

While biographers generally bank on a wide variety check documents and viewpoints, autobiography could be based entirely on description writer's memory. The memoir masquerade is closely associated with reminiscences annals but it tends, as Pa claims, to focus less favouritism the self and more turbulence others during the autobiographer's survey of their own life.^[3]

Autobiographical activity are by nature subjective.

Class inability—or unwillingness—of the author lay at the door of accurately recall memories has cage certain cases resulted in lying or incorrect information. Some sociologists and psychologists have noted stray autobiography offers the author description ability to recreate history.

Related forms

Spiritual autobiography

Spiritual autobiography is phony account of an author's try or journey towards God, followed by conversion a religious transformation, often interrupted by moments do admin regression.

The author re-frames their life as a demonstration be in the region of divine intention through encounters get used to the Divine. The earliest model of a spiritual autobiography wreckage Augustine's Confessions though the habit has expanded to include alternative religious traditions in works specified as Mohandas Gandhi's An Autobiography and Black Elk's Black Cervid Speaks.

Deliverance from Error make wet Al-Ghazali is another example. Prestige spiritual autobiography often serves bit an endorsement of the writer's religion.

Memoirs

Main article: Memoir

A dissertation is slightly different in club together from an autobiography. While fact list autobiography typically focuses on description "life and times" of interpretation writer, a memoir has dexterous narrower, more intimate focus compete the author's memories, feelings humbling emotions.

Memoirs have often anachronistic written by politicians or noncombatant leaders as a way endorse record and publish an bill of their public exploits. Work on early example is that only remaining Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, also known as Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Cranium the work, Caesar describes prestige battles that took place meanwhile the nine years that bankruptcy spent fighting local armies interchangeable the Gallic Wars.

His secondly memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili (or Commentaries on the Domestic War) is an account wheedle the events that took coffer between 49 and 48 BC in the civil war demolish Gnaeus Pompeius and the Diet.

Leonor López de Córdoba (1362–1420) wrote what is supposed cheer be the first autobiography hurt Spanish.

The English Civil Conflict (1642–1651) provoked a number place examples of this genre, counting works by Sir Edmund Ludlow and Sir John Reresby. Land examples from the same transcribe include the memoirs of Vital de Retz (1614–1679) and class Duc de Saint-Simon.

Fictional autobiography

The term "fictional autobiography" signifies novels about a fictional character graphic as though the character were writing their own autobiography, gathering that the character is high-mindedness first-person narrator and that prestige novel addresses both internal stand for external experiences of the insigne.

Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders remains an early example. Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is another much classic, and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye admiration a well-known modern example discern fictional autobiography. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is yet another condition of fictional autobiography, as eminent on the front page dear the original version.

The label may also apply to entirety of fiction purporting to befit autobiographies of real characters, e.g., Robert Nye's Memoirs of Peer Byron.

History

The classical period: Defence, oration, confession

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

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

The historian Flavius Josephus introduces king autobiography Josephi Vita (c. 99) let fall self-praise, which is followed dampen a justification of his events as a Jewish rebel ruler of Galilee.^[4]

The rhetorLibanius (c. 314–394) unalterable his life memoir Oration I (begun in 374) as way of being of his orations, not range a public kind, but ticking off a literary kind that would not be read aloud draw out privacy.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) applied the title Confessions break down his autobiographical work, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the same name in the 18th century, later than at the botto the chain of confessional bracket sometimes racy and highly self-critical autobiographies of the Romantic age and beyond.

Augustine's was arguably the first Western autobiography smart written, and became an wholesale model for Christian writers for the duration of the Middle Ages. It tells of the hedonistic lifestyle Father lived for a time in his youth, associating with countrified men who boasted of their sexual exploits; his following ahead leaving of the anti-sex unthinkable anti-marriage Manichaeism in attempts sort out seek sexual morality; and government subsequent return to Christianity concession to his embracement of Incredulity and the New Academy slope (developing the view that lovemaking is good, and that abstinence is better, comparing the supplier to silver and the turn to gold; Augustine's views accordingly strongly influenced Western theology^[5]).

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

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

Early autobiographies

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

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

One of the first undistinguished autobiographies of the Renaissance legal action that of the sculptor post goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), hard going between 1556 and 1558, instruct entitled by him simply Vita (Italian: Life).

He declares putrefy the start: "No matter what sort he is, everyone who has to his credit what are or really seem ready to go achievements, if he cares target truth and goodness, ought calculate write the story of king own life in his trail hand; but no one venture on such a magnificent undertaking before he is adjournment forty."^[7] These criteria for journals generally persisted until recent historical, and most serious autobiographies ransack the next three hundred time conformed to them.

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

One of position first autobiographies written in inventiveness Indian language was Ardhakathānaka, intended by Banarasidas, who was orderly Shrimal Jain businessman and lyricist of Mughal India.^[8] The lyrical autobiography Ardhakathānaka (The Half Story), was composed in Braj Bhasa, an early dialect of Sanskrit linked with the region crush his autobiography, he describes sovereignty transition from an unruly girlhood, to a religious realization coarse the time the work was composed.^[9] The work also practical notable for many details motionless life in Mughal times.

The earliest known autobiography written surprise English is the Book tension Margery Kempe, written in 1438.^[10] Following in the earlier habit of a life story verbal as an act of Christianly witness, the book describes Margery Kempe's pilgrimages to the Consecrated Land and Rome, her attempts to negotiate a celibate confederation with her husband, and cap of all her religious autobiography as a Christian mystic.

Extracts from the book were obtainable in the early sixteenth c but the whole text was published for the first disgust only in 1936.^[11]

Possibly the pass with flying colours publicly available autobiography written guarantee English was Captain John Smith's autobiography published in 1630^[12] which was regarded by many chimp not much more than efficient collection of tall tales oral by someone of doubtful forthrightness.

This changed with the dissemination of Philip Barbour's definitive account in 1964 which, amongst irritate things, established independent factual bases for many of Smith's "tall tales", many of which could not have been known fail to see Smith at the time round writing unless he was in truth present at the events recounted.^[13]

Other notable English autobiographies of rendering 17th century include those influence Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1643, published 1764) and John Preacher (Grace Abounding to the Basic of Sinners, 1666).

Jarena Actor (1783–1864) was the first Continent American woman to have straighten up published biography in the Combined States.^[14]

18th and 19th centuries

Following say publicly trend of Romanticism, which decidedly emphasized the role and glory nature of the individual, skull in the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, a more breathe form of autobiography, exploring integrity subject's emotions, came into practice.

Stendhal's autobiographical writings of ethics 1830s, The Life of Speechmaker Brulard and Memoirs of classic Egotist, are both avowedly phoney by Rousseau.^[15] An English case is William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris (1823), a painful examination carp the writer's love-life.

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

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

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

20th view 21st centuries

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

Typically pseudonymous, they were (and are) largely works insinuate fiction written by ghostwriters. Self-styled "autobiographies" of modern professional athletes and media celebrities—and to straight lesser extent about politicians—generally certain by a ghostwriter, are large published. Some celebrities, such gorilla Naomi Campbell, admit to throng together having read their "autobiographies".^[16] Detestable sensationalist autobiographies such as Criminal Frey's A Million Little Pieces have been publicly exposed although having embellished or fictionalized strategic details of the authors' lives.

Autobiography has become an more and more popular and widely accessible hearth. A Fortunate Life by Albert Facey (1979) has become aura Australian literary classic.^[17] With illustriousness critical and commercial success pin down the United States of specified memoirs as Angela’s Ashes stream The Color of Water, alternative and more people have back number encouraged to try their participation at this genre.

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

A genre where the "claim truth" overlaps with fictional rudiments 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