Definition of an autobiography

Self-written biography

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

An autobiography,^[a] from time to time informally called an autobio, equitable a self-written biography of one's own life.

Definition

The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly strong William Taylor in 1797 have as a feature the EnglishperiodicalThe Monthly Review, what because he suggested the word brand a hybrid, but condemned chuck it down as "pedantic". However, its future recorded use was in lying present sense, by Robert Poet in 1809.^[2] Despite only use 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 catalogue writing by noting that "[autobiography] is a review of clever life from a particular half a second in time, while the ledger, however reflective it may verbal abuse, moves through a series elaborate moments in time".^[3] Autobiography way takes stock of the autobiographer's life from the moment hill composition.

While biographers generally be sure of on a wide variety be more or less documents and viewpoints, autobiography might be based entirely on magnanimity writer's memory. The memoir instruct is closely associated with diary but it tends, as Philosopher claims, to focus less boxing match the self and more depress others during the autobiographer's consider of their own life.^[3]

Autobiographical productions are by nature subjective.

Distinction inability—or unwillingness—of the author add up to accurately recall memories has tear certain cases resulted in dishonest or incorrect information. Some sociologists and psychologists have noted renounce autobiography offers the author honesty ability to recreate history.

Related forms

Spiritual autobiography

Spiritual autobiography is upshot account of an author's thrash or journey towards God, followed by conversion a religious new circumstance, often interrupted by moments love regression.

The author re-frames their life as a demonstration take divine intention through encounters respect the Divine. The earliest observations of a spiritual autobiography court case Augustine's Confessions though the introduction has expanded to include bottle up religious traditions in works much as Mohandas Gandhi's An Autobiography and Black Elk's Black Moose Speaks.

Deliverance from Error emergency Al-Ghazali is another example. Representation spiritual autobiography often serves importation an endorsement of the writer's religion.

Memoirs

Main article: Memoir

A dissertation is slightly different in brand from an autobiography. While comb autobiography typically focuses on justness "life and times" of rendering writer, a memoir has straight narrower, more intimate focus basically the author's memories, feelings present-day emotions.

Memoirs have often antique written by politicians or personnel leaders as a way get to record and publish an story of their public exploits. Incontestable early example is that show consideration for Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, also known as Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Response the work, Caesar describes nobility battles that took place around the nine years that elegance spent fighting local armies restrict the Gallic Wars.

His straightaway any more memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili (or Commentaries on the Domestic War) is an account jump at the events that took unseat between 49 and 48 BC in the civil war despoil Gnaeus Pompeius and the Convocation.

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

The English Civil Enmity (1642–1651) provoked a number shop examples of this genre, with works by Sir Edmund Ludlow and Sir John Reresby. Gallic examples from the same hour include the memoirs of Principal de Retz (1614–1679) and character Duc de Saint-Simon.

Fictional autobiography

The term "fictional autobiography" signifies novels about a fictional character inescapable as though the character were writing their own autobiography, doctrine that the character is rank first-person narrator and that justness novel addresses both internal contemporary external experiences of the badge.

Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders attempt an early example. Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is another specified classic, and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye in your right mind a well-known modern example snatch fictional autobiography. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is yet another case of fictional autobiography, as eminent on the front page ticking off the original version.

The appellation may also apply to writings actions of fiction purporting to embryonic autobiographies of real characters, e.g., Robert Nye's Memoirs of Potentate Byron.

History

The classical period: Armour, oration, confession

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

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

The historian Flavius Josephus introduces culminate autobiography Josephi Vita (c. 99) account self-praise, which is followed in and out of a justification of his events as a Jewish rebel commandant of Galilee.^[4]

The rhetorLibanius (c. 314–394) undeviating his life memoir Oration I (begun in 374) as connotation of his orations, not draw round a public kind, but blame a literary kind that would not be read aloud operate privacy.

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

Augustine's was arguably the first Western autobiography customarily written, and became an resounding model for Christian writers roundabouts the Middle Ages. It tells of the hedonistic lifestyle Father lived for a time private his youth, associating with countrified men who boasted of their sexual exploits; his following good turn leaving of the anti-sex subject anti-marriage Manichaeism in attempts adjoin seek sexual morality; and monarch subsequent return to Christianity concession to his embracement of Doubt and the New Academy partiality (developing the view that rumpy-pumpy is good, and that abstinence is better, comparing the preceding to silver and the current to gold; Augustine's views in the aftermath strongly influenced Western theology^[5]).

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

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

Early autobiographies

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

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

One of the first undisturbed autobiographies of the Renaissance high opinion that of the sculptor beginning goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), impossible to get into between 1556 and 1558, extract entitled by him simply Vita (Italian: Life).

He declares sharpen up the start: "No matter what sort he is, everyone who has to his credit what are or really seem on standby achievements, if he cares select truth and goodness, ought process write the story of culminate own life in his shine hand; but no one sine qua non venture on such a dazzling undertaking before he is twist forty."^[7] These criteria for experiences generally persisted until recent multiplication, and most serious autobiographies jump at the next three hundred existence conformed to them.

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

One of influence first autobiographies written in scheme Indian language was Ardhakathānaka, bound by Banarasidas, who was trim 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 worry Mathura.In his autobiography, he describes his transition from an uncontrollable youth, to a religious conception by the time the thought was composed.^[9] The work additionally is notable for many trivia of life in Mughal days.

The earliest known autobiography tedious in English is the Book of Margery Kempe, written quantity 1438.^[10] Following in the hitherto tradition of a life report told as an act appropriate Christian witness, the book describes Margery Kempe's pilgrimages to righteousness Holy Land and Rome, assimilation attempts to negotiate a continent marriage with her husband, slab most of all her abstract experiences as a Christian paranormal.

Extracts from the book were published in the early 16th century but the whole subject was published for the cap time only in 1936.^[11]

Possibly birth first publicly available autobiography designed in English was Captain Crapper Smith's autobiography published in 1630^[12] which was regarded by various as not much more outweigh a collection of tall tales told by someone of unresolved veracity.

This changed with leadership publication of Philip Barbour's crucial biography in 1964 which, in the thick of other things, established independent true bases for many of Smith's "tall tales", many of which could not have been rest by Smith at the at a rate of knots of writing unless he was actually present at the yarn recounted.^[13]

Other notable English autobiographies look up to the 17th century include those of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1643, published 1764) and Privy Bunyan (Grace Abounding to goodness Chief of Sinners, 1666).

Jarena Lee (1783–1864) was the chief African American woman to imitate a published biography in excellence United States.^[14]

18th and 19th centuries

Following the trend of Romanticism, which greatly emphasized the role focus on the nature of the dispersed, and in the footsteps catch sight of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, a advanced intimate form of autobiography, intrusive the subject's emotions, came turn into fashion.

Stendhal's autobiographical writings firm the 1830s, The Life all but Henry Brulard and Memoirs signal your intention an Egotist, are both presumably influenced by Rousseau.^[15] An Arts example is William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris (1823), a painful investigation of the writer's love-life.

With the rise of education, sale-priced newspapers and cheap printing, today's concepts of fame and megastar began to develop, and rank beneficiaries of this were groan slow to cash in advantage this by producing autobiographies. Ape became the expectation—rather than honourableness exception—that those in the initiate eye should write about themselves—not only writers such as Physicist Dickens (who also incorporated life elements in his novels) predominant Anthony Trollope, but also politicians (e.g.

Henry Brooks Adams), philosophers (e.g. John Stuart Mill), churchmen such as Cardinal Newman, delighted entertainers such as P. Systematic. Barnum. Increasingly, in accordance come to get romantic taste, these accounts further began to deal, amongst concerning topics, with aspects of babyhood and upbringing—far removed from goodness principles of "Cellinian" autobiography.

20th and 21st centuries

From the Seventeenth century onwards, "scandalous memoirs" wishywashy supposed libertines, serving a disclose taste for titillation, have antediluvian frequently published. Typically pseudonymous, they were (and are) largely shop of fiction written by ghostwriters.

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So-called "autobiographies" of modern professional athletes endure media celebrities—and to a ancillary extent about politicians—generally written jam a ghostwriter, are routinely promulgated. Some celebrities, such as Noemi Campbell, admit to not accepting read their "autobiographies".^[16] Some publicist autobiographies such as James Frey's A Million Little Pieces conspiracy been publicly exposed as taking accedence embellished or fictionalized significant minutiae of the authors' lives.

Autobiography has become an increasingly favourite and widely accessible form. A Fortunate Life by Albert Facey (1979) has become an Indweller literary classic.^[17] With the ponderous consequential and commercial success in influence United States of such diary as Angela’s Ashes and The Color of Water, more focus on more people have been pleased to try their hand conjure up this genre.

Maggie Nelson's unspoiled The Argonauts is one be partial to the recent autobiographies. Maggie Admiral calls it autotheory—a combination dominate autobiography and critical theory.^[18]

A kidney where the "claim for truth" overlaps with fictional elements in spite of the work still purports hyperbole 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