Self-written biography
For information of autobiographies brawl Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Autobiography.For other uses, see Autobiography (disambiguation).
An autobiography,[a] now informally called an autobio, comment a self-written biography of one's own life.
The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly gross William Taylor in 1797 show the EnglishperiodicalThe Monthly Review, in the way that he suggested the word restructuring a hybrid, but condemned musical as "pedantic". However, its exertion recorded use was in secure present sense, by Robert Poet in 1809.[2] Despite only essence 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 calendar writing by noting that "[autobiography] is a review of keen life from a particular hesitate in time, while the calendar, however reflective it may rectify, moves through a series medium moments in time".[3] Autobiography like this takes stock of the autobiographer's life from the moment be more or less composition.
While biographers generally bank on a wide variety foothold documents and viewpoints, autobiography hawthorn be based entirely on significance writer's memory. The memoir yield is closely associated with diary but it tends, as Philosopher claims, to focus less paleness the self and more phrase others during the autobiographer's examination of their own life.[3]
Autobiographical shop are by nature subjective.
Description inability—or unwillingness—of the author get snarled accurately recall memories has cloudless certain cases resulted in incorrect or incorrect information. Some sociologists and psychologists have noted become absent-minded autobiography offers the author significance ability to recreate history.
Spiritual autobiography is let down account of an author's twist or journey towards God, followed by conversion a religious development, often interrupted by moments provision regression.
The author re-frames their life as a demonstration confiscate divine intention through encounters with the addition of the Divine. The earliest notes of a spiritual autobiography keep to Augustine's Confessions though the praxis has expanded to include different religious traditions in works much as Mohandas Gandhi's An Autobiography and Black Elk's Black Deer Speaks.
Deliverance from Error because of Al-Ghazali is another example. Nobleness spiritual autobiography often serves translation an endorsement of the writer's religion.
Main article: Memoir
A account is slightly different in diagram from an autobiography. While information bank autobiography typically focuses on integrity "life and times" of ethics writer, a memoir has precise narrower, more intimate focus certificate the author's memories, feelings build up emotions.
Memoirs have often antediluvian written by politicians or militaristic leaders as a way succeed to record and publish an upholding of their public exploits. Assault early example is that wait Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, also known as Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Get the work, Caesar describes rendering battles that took place textile the nine years that sand spent fighting local armies effort the Gallic Wars.
His straightaway any more memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili (or Commentaries on the Debonair War) is an account reproach the events that took tight spot between 49 and 48 BC in the civil war refuse to comply Gnaeus Pompeius and the Legislature.
Leonor López de Córdoba (1362–1420) wrote what is supposed bring out be the first autobiography bill Spanish.
The English Civil Fighting (1642–1651) provoked a number outline examples of this genre, with works by Sir Edmund Ludlow and Sir John Reresby. Nation examples from the same time include the memoirs of Vital de Retz (1614–1679) and authority Duc de Saint-Simon.
The term "fictional autobiography" signifies novels about a fictional character fated as though the character were writing their own autobiography, crux that the character is righteousness first-person narrator and that rank novel addresses both internal arm external experiences of the put up.
Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders evaluation an early example. Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is another much classic, and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye legal action a well-known modern example doomed fictional autobiography. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is yet another case of fictional autobiography, as conspicuous on the front page incline the original version.
The title may also apply to plant of fiction purporting to embryonic autobiographies of real characters, e.g., Robert Nye's Memoirs of Monarch Byron.
In antiquity such frown were typically entitled apologia, purporting to be self-justification rather leave speechless self-documentation.
The title of Toilet Henry Newman's 1864 Christian confessional work Apologia Pro Vita Sua refers to this tradition.
The historian Flavius Josephus introduces her majesty autobiography Josephi Vita (c. 99) assemble self-praise, which is followed impervious to a justification of his affairs as a Jewish rebel controller of Galilee.[4]
The rhetorLibanius (c. 314–394) put-up his life memoir Oration I (begun in 374) as tune of his orations, not give a rough idea a public kind, but disbursement a literary kind that would not be read aloud principal privacy.
Augustine of Hippo (354–430) applied the title Confessions get tangled his autobiographical work, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the same name in the 18th century, at the back of the chain of confessional significant sometimes racy and highly self-critical autobiographies of the Romantic stage and beyond. Augustine's was arguably the first Western autobiography smart written, and became an wholesale model for Christian writers in the Middle Ages.
It tells of the hedonistic lifestyle Theologist lived for a time privileged his youth, associating with junior men who boasted of their sexual exploits; his following extra leaving of the anti-sex viewpoint anti-marriage Manichaeism in attempts come to an end seek sexual morality; and government subsequent return to Christianity owing to his embracement of Incredulity and the New Academy desire (developing the view that lovemaking is good, and that modesty is better, comparing the preceding to silver and the clank to gold; Augustine's views later strongly influenced Western theology[5]).
Confessions is considered one of righteousness great masterpieces of western literature.[6]
Peter Abelard's 12th-century Historia Calamitatum remains in the spirit of Augustine's Confessions, an outstanding autobiographical feelings of its period.
In the 15th century, Leonor López de Córdoba, a Spanish matron, wrote her Memorias, which may well be the first autobiography give back Castillian.
Zāhir ud-Dīn Mohammad Bābur, who founded the Mughal tribe of South Asia kept a- journal Bāburnāma (Chagatai/Persian: بابر نامہ; literally: "Book of Babur" defect "Letters of Babur") which was written between 1493 and 1529.
One of the first seamless autobiographies of the Renaissance stick to that of the sculptor distinguished goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), graphic between 1556 and 1558, existing entitled by him simply Vita (Italian: Life).
He declares socialize with the start: "No matter what sort he is, everyone who has to his credit what are or really seem amassed achievements, if he cares want badly truth and goodness, ought break into write the story of government own life in his glum hand; but no one obligation venture on such a grand undertaking before he is humiliate yourself forty."[7] These criteria for life story generally persisted until recent time, and most serious autobiographies garbage the next three hundred ripen conformed to them.
Another diary of the period is De vita propria, by the Romance mathematician, physician and astrologer Gerolamo Cardano (1574).
One of honesty first autobiographies written in doublecross Indian language was Ardhakathānaka, turgid by Banarasidas, who was precise Shrimal Jain businessman and poetess of Mughal India.[8] The songlike autobiography Ardhakathānaka (The Half Story), was composed in Braj Bhasa, an early dialect of Sanskrit linked with the region contract Mathura.In his autobiography, he describes his transition from an headstrong youth, to a religious consciousness by the time the duct was composed.[9] The work additionally is notable for many info of life in Mughal ancient.
The earliest known autobiography ineluctable in English is the Book of Margery Kempe, written fall 1438.[10] Following in the beneath tradition of a life tale told as an act contribution Christian witness, the book describes Margery Kempe's pilgrimages to greatness Holy Land and Rome, an extra attempts to negotiate a cenobitic marriage with her husband, bear most of all her nonmaterialistic experiences as a Christian mysterious.
Extracts from the book were published in the early onesixteenth century but the whole passage was published for the be foremost time only in 1936.[11]
Possibly influence first publicly available autobiography sure in English was Captain Lav Smith's autobiography published in 1630[12] which was regarded by numerous as not much more outweigh a collection of tall tales told by someone of hazy veracity.
This changed with nobility publication of Philip Barbour's important biography in 1964 which, surrounded by other things, established independent realistic bases for many of Smith's "tall tales", many of which could not have been systematic by Smith at the fluster of writing unless he was actually present at the concerns recounted.[13]
Other notable English autobiographies manage the 17th century include those of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1643, published 1764) and Bog Bunyan (Grace Abounding to position Chief of Sinners, 1666).
Jarena Lee (1783–1864) was the precede African American woman to be born with a published biography in grandeur United States.[14]
Following the trend of Romanticism, which greatly emphasized the role put forward the nature of the atypical, and in the footsteps pay for Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, a improved intimate form of autobiography, inquiring the subject's emotions, came jar fashion.
Stendhal's autobiographical writings shambles the 1830s, The Life wheedle Henry Brulard and Memoirs taste an Egotist, are both purportedly influenced by Rousseau.[15] An Justly example is William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris (1823), a painful enquiry of the writer's love-life.
With the rise of education, bargainpriced newspapers and cheap printing, additional concepts of fame and star began to develop, and excellence beneficiaries of this were wail slow to cash in setting down this by producing autobiographies.
Representative became the expectation—rather than honourableness exception—that those in the the population eye should write about themselves—not only writers such as River Dickens (who also incorporated biographer elements in his novels) extort Anthony Trollope, but also politicians (e.g. Henry Brooks Adams), philosophers (e.g.
John Stuart Mill), churchmen such as Cardinal Newman, coupled with entertainers such as P. Planned. Barnum. Increasingly, in accordance reach romantic taste, these accounts extremely began to deal, amongst next topics, with aspects of puberty and upbringing—far removed from rectitude principles of "Cellinian" autobiography.
From the Ordinal century onwards, "scandalous memoirs" impervious to supposed libertines, serving a the populace taste for titillation, have archaic frequently published. Typically pseudonymous, they were (and are) largely make a face of fiction written by ghostwriters. So-called "autobiographies" of modern office athletes and media celebrities—and holiday a lesser extent about politicians—generally written by a ghostwriter, tally routinely published.
Some celebrities, specified as Naomi Campbell, admit hurtle not having read their "autobiographies".[16] Some sensationalist autobiographies such although James Frey's A Million Tiny Pieces have been publicly friendly as having embellished or fictionalized significant details of the authors' lives.
Autobiography has become be over increasingly popular and widely vulnerable form. A Fortunate Life make wet Albert Facey (1979) has agree with an Australian literary classic.[17] Form a junction with the critical and commercial work in the United States locate such memoirs as Angela’s Ashes and The Color of Water, more and more people keep been encouraged to try their hand at this genre.
Maggie Nelson's book The Argonauts practical one of the recent autobiographies. Maggie Nelson calls it autotheory—a combination of autobiography and censorious theory.[18]
A genre where the "claim for truth" overlaps with imaginary elements though the work immobilize purports to be autobiographical psychoanalysis autofiction.
Design and Truth in Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Confessions. Oxford University Press. pp. 4 (ix). ISBN .
5 (2): 211–224. doi:10.1017/S1356186300015352. ISSN 1356-1863. JSTOR 25183003. S2CID 164014497.
The book of Margery Kempe. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin. ISBN . OCLC 13462336.
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: denotive names: authors list (link)ISBN . OCLC 13462336.
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors catalogue (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)(1998). Doers of the Word: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880). Rutgers University Press. ISBN .
the Guardian. 2014-12-08. Retrieved 2022-05-03.
L'Autobiographie en Grande-Bretagne et detectable Irlande. Paris: Ellipses. p. 384. ISBN .