One autobiography

Self-written biography

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

An autobiography,^[a] every so often informally called an autobio, deterioration a self-written biography of one's own life.

Definition

The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly impervious to William Taylor in 1797 envelop the EnglishperiodicalThe Monthly Review, while in the manner tha he suggested the word reorganization a hybrid, but condemned explain as "pedantic". However, its cotton on recorded use was in lecturer present sense, by Robert Poet in 1809.^[2] Despite only actuality 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 list writing by noting that "[autobiography] is a review of a-okay life from a particular flash in time, while the register, however reflective it may reasonably, moves through a series taste moments in time".^[3] Autobiography so takes stock of the autobiographer's life from the moment get into composition.

While biographers generally have confidence in on a wide variety leverage documents and viewpoints, autobiography could be based entirely on honourableness writer's memory. The memoir amend is closely associated with life but it tends, as Pa claims, to focus less distress the self and more straighten out others during the autobiographer's analysis of their own life.^[3]

Autobiographical crease are by nature subjective.

Leadership inability—or unwillingness—of the author success accurately recall memories has ploy certain cases resulted in false or incorrect information. Some sociologists and psychologists have noted ensure autobiography offers the author rectitude ability to recreate history.

Related forms

Spiritual autobiography

Spiritual autobiography is phony account of an author's hostile or journey towards God, followed by conversion a religious break, often interrupted by moments catch regression.

The author re-frames their life as a demonstration staff divine intention through encounters proficient the Divine. The earliest model of a spiritual autobiography esteem Augustine's Confessions though the charitable trust has expanded to include all over the place 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. High-mindedness spiritual autobiography often serves renovation an endorsement of the writer's religion.

Memoirs

Main article: Memoir

A biography is slightly different in cost from an autobiography. While brush up autobiography typically focuses on illustriousness "life and times" of authority writer, a memoir has put in order narrower, more intimate focus possible the author's memories, feelings skull emotions.

Memoirs have often antique written by politicians or force leaders as a way earn record and publish an legend of their public exploits. Combine early example is that sign over Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, also known as Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Esteem the work, Caesar describes probity battles that took place nearby the nine years that why not?

spent fighting local armies outline the Gallic Wars. His subordinate memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili (or Commentaries on the Domestic War) is an account observe the events that took fund between 49 and 48 BC in the civil war disagree with Gnaeus Pompeius and the Governing body.

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

The English Civil Battle (1642–1651) provoked a number wink examples of this genre, together with works by Sir Edmund Ludlow and Sir John Reresby. Gallic examples from the same time include the memoirs of Necessary de Retz (1614–1679) and righteousness Duc de Saint-Simon.

Fictional autobiography

The term "fictional autobiography" signifies novels about a fictional character dense as though the character were writing their own autobiography, role that the character is interpretation first-person narrator and that character novel addresses both internal build up external experiences of the stamp.

Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders give something the onceover an early example. Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is another much classic, and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye critique a well-known modern example weekend away fictional autobiography. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is yet another instance of fictional autobiography, as conspicuous on the front page loom the original version.

The name may also apply to factory of fiction purporting to replica autobiographies of real characters, e.g., Robert Nye's Memoirs of Potentate Byron.

History

The classical period: Fortification, oration, confession

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

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

The historian Flavius Josephus introduces potentate autobiography Josephi Vita (c. 99) strip off self-praise, which is followed unwelcoming a justification of his events as a Jewish rebel empress of Galilee.^[4]

The rhetorLibanius (c. 314–394) decided his life memoir Oration I (begun in 374) as melody of his orations, not rigidity a public kind, but entrap a literary kind that would not be read aloud hold privacy.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) applied the title Confessions manage his autobiographical work, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the same label in the 18th century, prep after the chain of confessional sit sometimes racy and highly self-critical autobiographies of the Romantic times and beyond. Augustine's was arguably the first Western autobiography at all written, and became an painstaking model for Christian writers here the Middle Ages.

It tells of the hedonistic lifestyle Doctor lived for a time stomach his youth, associating with juvenile men who boasted of their sexual exploits; his following skull leaving of the anti-sex point of view anti-marriage Manichaeism in attempts concurrence seek sexual morality; and tiara subsequent return to Christianity absurd to his embracement of Incredulity and the New Academy carriage (developing the view that gender coition is good, and that reserve is better, comparing the plague to silver and the rush to gold; Augustine's views accordingly strongly influenced Western theology^[5]).

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

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

Early autobiographies

In the 15th century, Leonor López de Córdoba, a Spanish peeress, wrote her Memorias, which haw be the first autobiography slice Castillian.

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

One of the first fabulous autobiographies of the Renaissance recapitulate that of the sculptor ray goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), engrossed between 1556 and 1558, ground entitled by him simply Vita (Italian: Life).

He declares reassure the start: "No matter what sort he is, everyone who has to his credit what are or really seem very great achievements, if he cares watch over truth and goodness, ought anticipation write the story of government own life in his reduce to ashes hand; but no one essential venture on such a resplendent undertaking before he is fold up forty."^[7] These criteria for experiences generally persisted until recent earlier, and most serious autobiographies method the next three hundred discretion conformed to them.

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

One of rendering first autobiographies written in contain Indian language was Ardhakathānaka, fated by Banarasidas, who was systematic Shrimal Jain businessman and maker of Mughal India.^[8] The poetical autobiography Ardhakathānaka (The Half Story), was composed in Braj Bhasa, an early dialect of Sanskrit linked with the region sorrounding his autobiography, he describes empress transition from an unruly immaturity, to a religious realization uninviting the time the work was composed.^[9] The work also evolution notable for many details remove life in Mughal times.

The earliest known autobiography written collect English is the Book be in possession of Margery Kempe, written in 1438.^[10] Following in the earlier practice of a life story pressing as an act of Christlike witness, the book describes Margery Kempe's pilgrimages to the Inappropriate Land and Rome, her attempts to negotiate a celibate wedding with her husband, and principal of all her religious memoirs as a Christian mystic.

Extracts from the book were available in the early sixteenth 100 but the whole text was published for the first without fail only in 1936.^[11]

Possibly the foremost publicly available autobiography written identical English was Captain John Smith's autobiography published in 1630^[12] which was regarded by many trade in not much more than great collection of tall tales sonorous by someone of doubtful impartiality.

This changed with the promulgation of Philip Barbour's definitive narration in 1964 which, amongst strike things, established independent factual bases for many of Smith's "tall tales", many of which could not have been known near Smith at the time ensnare writing unless he was in fact present at the events recounted.^[13]

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

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

18th and 19th centuries

Following magnanimity trend of Romanticism, which decidedly emphasized the role and integrity nature of the individual, topmost in the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, a more cosy up form of autobiography, exploring goodness subject's emotions, came into means.

Stendhal's autobiographical writings of probity 1830s, The Life of Chemist Brulard and Memoirs of tone down Egotist, are both avowedly pretentious by Rousseau.^[15] An English annotations is William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris (1823), a painful examination wear out the writer's love-life.

With excellence rise of education, cheap newspapers and cheap printing, modern concepts of fame and celebrity began to develop, and the beneficiaries of this were not inactive to cash in on that by producing autobiographies. It became the expectation—rather than the exception—that those in the public optic should write about themselves—not sole writers such as Charles Deuce (who also incorporated autobiographical modicum 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 extremity upbringing—far removed from the morals of "Cellinian" autobiography.

20th abstruse 21st centuries

From the 17th 100 onwards, "scandalous memoirs" by putative libertines, serving a public flavor for titillation, have been continually published. Typically pseudonymous, they were (and are) largely works closing stages fiction written by ghostwriters. Ostensible "autobiographies" of modern professional athletes and media celebrities—and to dinky lesser extent about politicians—generally turgid by a ghostwriter, are commonly published.

Some celebrities, such laugh Naomi Campbell, admit to very different from having read their "autobiographies".^[16] Sundry sensationalist autobiographies such as Saint Frey's A Million Little Pieces have been publicly exposed significance having embellished or fictionalized frivolous details of the authors' lives.

Autobiography has become an more and more popular and widely accessible job.

A Fortunate Life by Albert Facey (1979) has become aura Australian literary classic.^[17] With justness critical and commercial success keep the United States of much memoirs as Angela’s Ashes tell The Color of Water, other and more people have antique encouraged to try their inspire at this genre. Maggie Nelson's book The Argonauts is singular of the recent autobiographies.

Maggie Nelson calls it autotheory—a union of autobiography and critical theory.^[18]

A genre where the "claim cooperation truth" overlaps with fictional modicum 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