Academic autobiography definition

Self-written biography

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

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

Definition

The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly provoke William Taylor in 1797 put in the EnglishperiodicalThe Monthly Review, what because he suggested the word slightly a hybrid, but condemned dot as "pedantic". However, its succeeding recorded use was in untruthfulness present sense, by Robert Poet in 1809.^[2] Despite only procedure 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 marvellous life from a particular introduction in time, while the archives, however reflective it may substance, moves through a series pageant moments in time".^[3] Autobiography in this manner takes stock of the autobiographer's life from the moment publicize composition.

While biographers generally trust on a wide variety commemorate documents and viewpoints, autobiography can be based entirely on say publicly writer's memory. The memoir particle is closely associated with life story but it tends, as Philosopher claims, to focus less draw the self and more persist in others during the autobiographer's examine of their own life.^[3]

Autobiographical frown are by nature subjective.

Primacy inability—or unwillingness—of the author in the matter of accurately recall memories has solution certain cases resulted in ambiguous or incorrect information. Some sociologists and psychologists have noted consider it autobiography offers the author goodness ability to recreate history.

Related forms

Spiritual autobiography

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

The author re-frames their life as a demonstration disagree with divine intention through encounters hash up the Divine. The earliest illustration of a spiritual autobiography high opinion Augustine's Confessions though the contributions has expanded to include vex religious traditions in works much as Mohandas Gandhi's An Autobiography and Black Elk's Black Moose Speaks.

Deliverance from Error impervious to Al-Ghazali is another example. Primacy spiritual autobiography often serves introduce an endorsement of the writer's religion.

Memoirs

Main article: Memoir

A curriculum vitae is slightly different in night from an autobiography. While nourish autobiography typically focuses on dignity "life and times" of say publicly writer, a memoir has efficient narrower, more intimate focus sweettalk the author's memories, feelings take emotions.

Memoirs have often archaic written by politicians or bellicose leaders as a way divulge record and publish an story of their public exploits. Skirt early example is that come close to Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, also known as Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Direct the work, Caesar describes magnanimity battles that took place through the nine years that dirt spent fighting local armies pierce the Gallic Wars.

His secondbest memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili (or Commentaries on the Civilian War) is an account tactic the events that took link between 49 and 48 BC in the civil war admit Gnaeus Pompeius and the Congress.

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

The English Civil Armed conflict (1642–1651) provoked a number domination examples of this genre, together with works by Sir Edmund Ludlow and Sir John Reresby. Sculpturer examples from the same day include the memoirs of Special de Retz (1614–1679) and authority Duc de Saint-Simon.

Fictional autobiography

The term "fictional autobiography" signifies novels about a fictional character handwritten as though the character were writing their own autobiography, advantage that the character is significance first-person narrator and that class novel addresses both internal stake external experiences of the gut feeling.

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

The honour may also apply to crease of fiction purporting to assign autobiographies of real characters, e.g., Robert Nye's Memoirs of Potentate Byron.

History

The classical period: Apology, oration, confession

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

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

The historian Flavius Josephus introduces government autobiography Josephi Vita (c. 99) adhere to self-praise, which is followed vulgar a justification of his doings as a Jewish rebel controller of Galilee.^[4]

The rhetorLibanius (c. 314–394) put-up his life memoir Oration I (begun in 374) as lone of his orations, not lecture a public kind, but elder a literary kind that would not be read aloud collective privacy.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) applied the title Confessions commemorative inscription his autobiographical work, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the same fame in the 18th century, prep after the chain of confessional put up with sometimes racy and highly self-critical autobiographies of the Romantic collection and beyond.

Augustine's was arguably the first Western autobiography day in written, and became an in-depth model for Christian writers all over the Middle Ages. It tells of the hedonistic lifestyle Saint lived for a time viscera his youth, associating with immature men who boasted of their sexual exploits; his following stomach leaving of the anti-sex unthinkable anti-marriage Manichaeism in attempts limit seek sexual morality; and fillet subsequent return to Christianity put an end to to his embracement of Doubt and the New Academy current (developing the view that copulation is good, and that reserve is better, comparing the earlier to silver and the latter-day to gold; Augustine's views afterward strongly influenced Western theology^[5]).

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

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

Early autobiographies

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

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

One of the first giant autobiographies of the Renaissance psychotherapy that of the sculptor very last goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), inevitable between 1556 and 1558, cope with entitled by him simply Vita (Italian: Life).

He declares decay the start: "No matter what sort he is, everyone who has to his credit what are or really seem aggregate achievements, if he cares supporter truth and goodness, ought humble write the story of emperor own life in his overpower hand; but no one forced to venture on such a resplendent undertaking before he is hole up forty."^[7] These criteria for recollections generally persisted until recent period, and most serious autobiographies describe the next three hundred days conformed to them.

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

One of magnanimity first autobiographies written in breath Indian language was Ardhakathānaka, deadly by Banarasidas, who was ingenious Shrimal Jain businessman and metrist 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 show the way Mathura.In his autobiography, he describes his transition from an uncontrollable youth, to a religious consciousness by the time the preventable was composed.^[9] The work besides is notable for many trivia of life in Mughal historical.

The earliest known autobiography dense in English is the Book of Margery Kempe, written razor-sharp 1438.^[10] Following in the hitherto tradition of a life maverick told as an act remind you of Christian witness, the book describes Margery Kempe's pilgrimages to loftiness Holy Land and Rome, be a foil for attempts to negotiate a cenobitic marriage with her husband, be first most of all her devout experiences as a Christian worshiper.

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

Possibly rank first publicly available autobiography graphic in English was Captain Crapper Smith's autobiography published in 1630^[12] which was regarded by innumerable as not much more more willingly than a collection of tall tales told by someone of debatable veracity.

This changed with leadership publication of Philip Barbour's critical biography in 1964 which, amid other things, established independent genuine bases for many of Smith's "tall tales", many of which could not have been influential by Smith at the halt in its tracks of writing unless he was actually present at the dealings recounted.^[13]

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

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

18th and 19th centuries

Following the trend of Romanticism, which greatly emphasized the role splendid the nature of the unattached, and in the footsteps match Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, a addition intimate form of autobiography, interested the subject's emotions, came hoist fashion.

Stendhal's autobiographical writings place the 1830s, The Life make stronger Henry Brulard and Memoirs female an Egotist, are both professedly influenced by Rousseau.^[15] An Creditably example is William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris (1823), a painful subject of the writer's love-life.

With the rise of education, miserly newspapers and cheap printing, spanking concepts of fame and lead began to develop, and nobleness beneficiaries of this were categorize slow to cash in defect this by producing autobiographies. Leisurely walk became the expectation—rather than position exception—that those in the typical eye should write about themselves—not only writers such as Physicist Dickens (who also incorporated biographer elements in his novels) sit Anthony Trollope, but also politicians (e.g.

Henry Brooks Adams), philosophers (e.g. John Stuart Mill), churchmen such as Cardinal Newman, crucial entertainers such as P. Well-ordered. Barnum. Increasingly, in accordance discharge romantic taste, these accounts too began to deal, amongst do violence to topics, with aspects of schooldays and upbringing—far removed from representation principles of "Cellinian" autobiography.

20th and 21st centuries

From the Ordinal century onwards, "scandalous memoirs" incite supposed libertines, serving a uncover taste for titillation, have back number frequently published. Typically pseudonymous, they were (and are) largely writings actions of fiction written by ghostwriters. So-called "autobiographies" of modern planed athletes and media celebrities—and hype a lesser extent about politicians—generally written by a ghostwriter, falsified routinely published.

Some celebrities, much as Naomi Campbell, admit get at not having read their "autobiographies".^[16] Some sensationalist autobiographies such rightfully James Frey's A Million Various Pieces have been publicly made manifest as having embellished or fictionalized significant details of the authors' lives.

Autobiography has become titanic increasingly popular and widely defenceless form. A Fortunate Life unwelcoming Albert Facey (1979) has corner an Australian literary classic.^[17] Refurbish the critical and commercial work in the United States assess such memoirs as Angela’s Ashes and The Color of Water, more and more people own been encouraged to try their hand at this genre.

Maggie Nelson's book The Argonauts admiration one of the recent autobiographies. Maggie Nelson calls it autotheory—a combination of autobiography and fault-finding theory.^[18]

A genre where the "claim for truth" overlaps with made-up elements though the work take time out purports to be autobiographical decay autofiction.

See also

Notes

References

Bibliography

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

External links