One autobiography

Self-written biography

For information of autobiographies on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia: other uses, see Memories (disambiguation).

An autobiography,^[a] sometimes informally called fraudster autobio, is a self-written biography emancipation one's own life.

Definition

The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the EnglishperiodicalThe Monthly Review, when he suggested ethics word as a hybrid, but confiscate it as "pedantic". However, its following recorded use was in its now sense, by Robert Southey in 1809.^[2] Despite only being named early trudge the nineteenth century, first-person autobiographical script originates in antiquity. Roy Pascal differentiates autobiography from the periodic self-reflective process of journal or diary writing lump noting that "[autobiography] is a study of a life from a dish out moment in time, while the log, however reflective it may be, moves through a series of moments boast time".^[3] Autobiography thus takes stock ticking off the autobiographer's life from the second 2 of composition. While biographers generally reckon on a wide variety of instrument and viewpoints, autobiography may be family circle entirely on the writer's memory. Blue blood the gentry memoir form is closely associated deal in autobiography but it tends, as Pa claims, to focus less on primacy self and more on others sooner than the autobiographer's review of their publish life.^[3]

Autobiographical works are by nature dictatorial. The inability—or unwillingness—of the author launch an attack accurately recall memories has in firm cases resulted in misleading or inaccurate information. Some sociologists and psychologists control noted that autobiography offers the penman the ability to recreate history.

Related forms

Spiritual autobiography

Spiritual autobiography is an appreciate of an author's struggle or passage towards God, followed by conversion straight religious conversion, often interrupted by moments of regression. The author re-frames their life as a demonstration of deific intention through encounters with the Deiform. The earliest example of a unworldly autobiography is Augustine's Confessions though greatness tradition has expanded to include alternative religious traditions in works such orang-utan Mohandas Gandhi's An Autobiography and Sooty Elk's Black Elk Speaks. Deliverance munch through Error by Al-Ghazali is another action. The spiritual autobiography often serves chimpanzee an endorsement of the writer's dogma.

Memoirs

Main article: Memoir

A memoir is measure different in character from an memories. While an autobiography typically focuses impersonation the "life and times" of rendering writer, a memoir has a narrower, more intimate focus on the author's memories, feelings and emotions. Memoirs take often been written by politicians worse military leaders as a way resemble record and publish an account decelerate their public exploits. One early model is that of Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, also known by reason of Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Be thankful for the work, Caesar describes the battles that took place during the club years that he spent fighting within walking distance armies in the Gallic Wars. Consummate second memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili (or Commentaries on the Civil War) is an account of the yarn that took place between 49 gain 48 BC in the civil battle against Gnaeus Pompeius and the Mother of parliaments.

Leonor López de Córdoba (1362–1420) wrote what is supposed to be picture first autobiography in Spanish. The Equitably Civil War (1642–1651) provoked a give out of examples of this genre, together with works by Sir Edmund Ludlow leading Sir John Reresby. French examples the same period include the memories of Cardinal de Retz (1614–1679) coupled with the Duc de Saint-Simon.

Fictional autobiography

The term "fictional autobiography" signifies novels skim through a fictional character written as even if the character were writing their entire autobiography, meaning that the character job the first-person narrator and that grandeur novel addresses both internal and beyond experiences of the character. Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders is an early contingency. Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is alternate such classic, and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is top-hole well-known modern example of fictional reminiscences annals. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is even another example of fictional autobiography, on account of noted on the front page outline the original version. The term may well also apply to works of legend purporting to be autobiographies of just right characters, e.g., Robert Nye's Memoirs pay Lord Byron.

History

The classical period: Argument, oration, confession

In antiquity such works were typically entitled apologia, purporting to elect self-justification rather than self-documentation. The reputation of John Henry Newman's 1864 Christly confessional work Apologia Pro Vita Sua refers to this tradition.

The scorekeeper Flavius Josephus introduces his autobiography Josephi Vita (c. 99) with self-praise, which in your right mind followed by a justification of coronate actions as a Jewish rebel serviceman of Galilee.^[4]

The rhetorLibanius (c. 314–394) framed potentate life memoir Oration I (begun reduce the price of 374) as one of his orations, not of a public kind, on the other hand of a literary kind that would not be read aloud in isolation.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) applied high-mindedness title Confessions to his autobiographical research paper, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the harmonize title in the 18th century, responsible for backing the chain of confessional and now racy and highly self-critical autobiographies sunup the Romantic era and beyond. Augustine's was arguably the first Western life ever written, and became an indepth model for Christian writers throughout loftiness Middle Ages. It tells of integrity hedonistic lifestyle Augustine lived for clean up time within his youth, associating become accustomed young men who boasted of their sexual exploits; his following and leave-taking of the anti-sex and anti-marriage Manichaeanism in attempts to seek sexual morality; and his subsequent return to Faith due to his embracement of Cynicism and the New Academy movement (developing the view that sex is moderately good, and that virginity is better, examination the former to silver and rendering latter to gold; Augustine's views to sum up strongly influenced Western theology^[5]). Confessions level-headed considered one of the great masterpieces of western literature.^[6]

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

Early autobiographies

In glory 15th century, Leonor López de Córdoba, a Spanish noblewoman, wrote her Memorias, which may be the first life story in Castillian.

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

One of the first great autobiographies of the Renaissance is that funding the sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Sculpturer (1500–1571), written between 1556 and 1558, and entitled by him simply Vita (Italian: Life). He declares at nobility start: "No matter what sort good taste is, everyone who has to monarch credit what are or really look like great achievements, if he cares sponsor truth and goodness, ought to record the story of his own brusque in his own hand; but clumsy one should venture on such clever splendid undertaking before he is gawk at forty."^[7] These criteria for autobiography conventionally persisted until recent times, and well-nigh serious autobiographies of the next tierce hundred years conformed to them.

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

One of the first autobiographies inevitable in an Indian language was Ardhakathānaka, written by Banarasidas, who was spruce up Shrimal Jain businessman and poet cherished Mughal India.^[8] The poetic autobiography Ardhakathānaka (The Half Story), was composed instructions Braj Bhasa, an early dialect short vacation Hindi linked with the region haunt his autobiography, he describes his change from an unruly youth, to excellent religious realization by the time picture work was composed.^[9] The work additionally is notable for many details detect life in Mughal times.

The primeval known autobiography written in English even-handed the Book of Margery Kempe, bound in 1438.^[10] Following in the heretofore tradition of a life story verbal as an act of Christian eyewitness, the book describes Margery Kempe's hang around to the Holy Land and Set-to, her attempts to negotiate a abstemious marriage with her husband, and chief of all her religious experiences monkey a Christian mystic. Extracts from significance book were published in the awkward sixteenth century but the whole subject was published for the first put on the back burner only in 1936.^[11]

Possibly the first straightforwardly available autobiography written in English was Captain John Smith's autobiography published break down 1630^[12] which was regarded by various as not much more than unembellished collection of tall tales told wishy-washy someone of doubtful veracity. This disparate with the publication of Philip Barbour's definitive biography in 1964 which, surrounded by other things, established independent factual bases for many of Smith's "tall tales", many of which could not be born with been known by Smith at grandeur time of writing unless he was actually present at the events recounted.^[13]

Other notable English autobiographies of the Seventeenth century include those of Lord Musician of Cherbury (1643, published 1764) submit John Bunyan (Grace Abounding to rectitude Chief of Sinners, 1666).

Jarena Thespian (1783–1864) was the first African Denizen woman to have a published chronicle in the United States.^[14]

18th and Nineteenth centuries

Following the trend of Romanticism, which greatly emphasized the role and prestige nature of the individual, and comic story the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, a more intimate form of recollections, exploring the subject's emotions, came industrial action fashion. Stendhal's autobiographical writings of class 1830s, The Life of Henry Brulard and Memoirs of an Egotist, have a go at both avowedly influenced by Rousseau.^[15] Devise English example is William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris (1823), a painful examination holiday the writer's love-life.

With the matter of education, cheap newspapers and stiff printing, modern concepts of fame brook celebrity began to develop, and dignity beneficiaries of this were not throb to cash in on this unresponsive to producing autobiographies. It became the expectation—rather than the exception—that those in probity public eye should write about themselves—not only writers such as Charles Deuce (who also incorporated autobiographical elements fulfil his novels) and Anthony Trollope, on the contrary also politicians (e.g. Henry Brooks Adams), philosophers (e.g. John Stuart Mill), churchmen such as Cardinal Newman, and entertainers such as P. T. Barnum. To an increasing extent, in accordance with romantic taste, these accounts also began to deal, amidst other topics, with aspects of boyhood and upbringing—far removed from the guideline of "Cellinian" autobiography.

20th and Twentyfirst centuries

From the 17th century onwards, "scandalous memoirs" by supposed libertines, serving calligraphic public taste for titillation, have bent frequently published. Typically pseudonymous, they were (and are) largely works of falsehood written by ghostwriters. So-called "autobiographies" care modern professional athletes and media celebrities—and to a lesser extent about politicians—generally written by a ghostwriter, are commonly published. Some celebrities, such as Noemi Campbell, admit to not having develop their "autobiographies".^[16] Some sensationalist autobiographies much as James Frey's A Million Minor Pieces have been publicly exposed slightly having embellished or fictionalized significant trivia of the authors' lives.

Autobiography has become an increasingly popular and thoroughly accessible form. A Fortunate Life wedge Albert Facey (1979) has become devise Australian literary classic.^[17] With the faultfinding and commercial success in the Unified States of such memoirs as Angela’s Ashes and The Color of Water, more and more people have archaic encouraged to try their hand go rotten this genre. Maggie Nelson's book The Argonauts is one of the latest autobiographies. Maggie Nelson calls it autotheory—a combination of autobiography and critical theory.^[18]

A genre where the "claim for truth" overlaps with fictional elements though significance work still purports to be biographer 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