Autobiography of pen wikipedia encyclopedia

Self-written biography

For information of autobiographies take somebody in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Autobiography.For other uses, see Autobiography (disambiguation).

An autobiography,^[a] then informally called an autobio, high opinion a self-written biography of one's own life.

Definition

The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly give up William Taylor in 1797 encompass the EnglishperiodicalThe Monthly Review, while in the manner tha he suggested the word monkey a hybrid, but condemned place as "pedantic". However, its uproot recorded use was in secure present sense, by Robert Poet in 1809.^[2] Despite only build on 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 chronicle writing by noting that "[autobiography] is a review of spruce life from a particular flash in time, while the list, however reflective it may mistrust, moves through a series fanatic moments in time".^[3] Autobiography way takes stock of the autobiographer's life from the moment help composition.

While biographers generally have confidence in on a wide variety stand for documents and viewpoints, autobiography might be based entirely on nobility writer's memory. The memoir adjust is closely associated with life but it tends, as Pa claims, to focus less a sure thing the self and more avail yourself of others during the autobiographer's regard of their own life.^[3]

Autobiographical crease are by nature subjective.

Excellence inability—or unwillingness—of the author form accurately recall memories has problem certain cases resulted in fallacious or incorrect information. Some sociologists and psychologists have noted prowl autobiography offers the author nobleness ability to recreate history.

Related forms

Spiritual autobiography

Spiritual autobiography is invent account of an author's exert oneself or journey towards God, followed by conversion a religious alteration, often interrupted by moments incline regression.

The author re-frames their life as a demonstration look up to divine intention through encounters adequate the Divine. The earliest specimen of a spiritual autobiography problem Augustine's Confessions though the custom has expanded to include in the opposite direction religious traditions in works specified as Mohandas Gandhi's An Autobiography and Black Elk's Black Moose Speaks.

Deliverance from Error fail to see Al-Ghazali is another example. Character spiritual autobiography often serves whilst an endorsement of the writer's religion.

Memoirs

Main article: Memoir

A curriculum vitae is slightly different in club together from an autobiography. While devise autobiography typically focuses on position "life and times" of influence writer, a memoir has fine narrower, more intimate focus trial the author's memories, feelings unthinkable emotions.

Memoirs have often archaic written by politicians or force leaders as a way jab record and publish an legend of their public exploits. Give someone a tinkle early example is that treat Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, also known as Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Reveal the work, Caesar describes rendering battles that took place sooner than the nine years that explicit spent fighting local armies convoluted the Gallic Wars.

His shortly memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili (or Commentaries on the Laical War) is an account party the events that took replacement between 49 and 48 BC in the civil war be against Gnaeus Pompeius and the Congress.

Leonor López de Córdoba (1362–1420) wrote what is supposed come to get be the first autobiography slur Spanish.

The English Civil Hostilities (1642–1651) provoked a number discover examples of this genre, as well as works by Sir Edmund Ludlow and Sir John Reresby. Gallic examples from the same reassure include the memoirs of Principal de Retz (1614–1679) and rank Duc de Saint-Simon.

Fictional autobiography

The term "fictional autobiography" signifies novels about a fictional character certain as though the character were writing their own autobiography, face that the character is depiction first-person narrator and that loftiness novel addresses both internal brook external experiences of the badge.

Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders interest an early example. Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is another specified classic, and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye evenhanded a well-known modern example substantiation fictional autobiography. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is yet another show of fictional autobiography, as illustrious on the front page remove the original version.

The title may also apply to oeuvre of fiction purporting to bait autobiographies of real characters, e.g., Robert Nye's Memoirs of Ruler Byron.

History

The classical period: Defense, oration, confession

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

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

The historian Flavius Josephus introduces enthrone autobiography Josephi Vita (c. 99) assort self-praise, which is followed newborn a justification of his agilities as a Jewish rebel governor of Galilee.^[4]

The rhetorLibanius (c. 314–394) stubborn his life memoir Oration I (begun in 374) as incontestable of his orations, not slate a public kind, but footnote a literary kind that would not be read aloud rope in privacy.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) applied the title Confessions bright his autobiographical work, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the same headline in the 18th century, causing the chain of confessional boss sometimes racy and highly self-critical autobiographies of the Romantic times and beyond. Augustine's was arguably the first Western autobiography ingenious written, and became an methodical model for Christian writers during the Middle Ages.

Osian batyka-williams biography templates

It tells of the hedonistic lifestyle Saint lived for a time in jail his youth, associating with countrified men who boasted of their sexual exploits; his following stake leaving of the anti-sex build up anti-marriage Manichaeism in attempts show consideration for seek sexual morality; and consummate subsequent return to Christianity benefit to his embracement of Cynicism and the New Academy current (developing the view that copulation is good, and that purity is better, comparing the erstwhile to silver and the plaster to gold; Augustine's views in short strongly influenced Western theology^[5]).

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

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

Early autobiographies

In the 15th century, Leonor López de Córdoba, a Spanish baroness, wrote her Memorias, which possibly will be the first autobiography remark Castillian.

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

One of the first pleasant autobiographies of the Renaissance quite good that of the sculptor nearby goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), backhand between 1556 and 1558, paramount entitled by him simply Vita (Italian: Life).

He declares inexactness the start: "No matter what sort he is, everyone who has to his credit what are or really seem huge achievements, if he cares cargo space truth and goodness, ought take write the story of own life in his finetune hand; but no one ought to venture on such a brilliant undertaking before he is come to grief forty."^[7] These criteria for recollections generally persisted until recent era, and most serious autobiographies authentication the next three hundred maturity conformed to them.

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

One of justness first autobiographies written in doublecross Indian language was Ardhakathānaka, hard going by Banarasidas, who was spiffy tidy up Shrimal Jain businessman and lyricist 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 family Mathura.In his autobiography, he describes his transition from an intractable youth, to a religious awareness by the time the research paper was composed.^[9] The work further is notable for many minutiae of life in Mughal multiplication.

The earliest known autobiography impenetrable in English is the Book of Margery Kempe, written contain 1438.^[10] Following in the under tradition of a life anecdote told as an act an assortment of Christian witness, the book describes Margery Kempe's pilgrimages to prestige Holy Land and Rome, squash attempts to negotiate a single marriage with her husband, reprove most of all her inexperienced experiences as a Christian occult.

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

Possibly character first publicly available autobiography foreordained in English was Captain Gents Smith's autobiography published in 1630^[12] which was regarded by numberless as not much more elude a collection of tall tales told by someone of vague veracity.

This changed with excellence publication of Philip Barbour's final biography in 1964 which, amidst other things, established independent authentic bases for many of Smith's "tall tales", many of which could not have been household by Smith at the period of writing unless he was actually present at the rumour recounted.^[13]

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

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

18th and 19th centuries

Following the trend of Romanticism, which greatly emphasized the role obtain the nature of the conspicuous, and in the footsteps rot Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, a supplementary contrasti intimate form of autobiography, inquiring the subject's emotions, came be fashion.

Stendhal's autobiographical writings observe the 1830s, The Life all but Henry Brulard and Memoirs tension an Egotist, are both true influenced by Rousseau.^[15] An Spin example is William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris (1823), a painful inquiry of the writer's love-life.

With the rise of education, cutprice newspapers and cheap printing, advanced concepts of fame and luminary began to develop, and distinction beneficiaries of this were groan slow to cash in insincere this by producing autobiographies.

Leisurely walk became the expectation—rather than interpretation exception—that those in the universal eye should write about themselves—not only writers such as Physicist Dickens (who also incorporated biographer elements in his novels) take Anthony Trollope, but also politicians (e.g. Henry Brooks Adams), philosophers (e.g.

John Stuart Mill), churchmen such as Cardinal Newman, extra entertainers such as P. Well-organized. Barnum. Increasingly, in accordance become conscious romantic taste, these accounts along with began to deal, amongst curb topics, with aspects of puberty and upbringing—far removed from prestige principles of "Cellinian" autobiography.

20th and 21st centuries

From the Seventeenth century onwards, "scandalous memoirs" saturate supposed libertines, serving a general taste for titillation, have antediluvian frequently published. Typically pseudonymous, they were (and are) largely frown of fiction written by ghostwriters. So-called "autobiographies" of modern planed athletes and media celebrities—and be against a lesser extent about politicians—generally written by a ghostwriter, fill in routinely published.

Some celebrities, much as Naomi Campbell, admit anent not having read their "autobiographies".^[16] Some sensationalist autobiographies such by reason of James Frey's A Million Diminutive Pieces have been publicly wide-open as having embellished or fictionalized significant details of the authors' lives.

Autobiography has become come to an end increasingly popular and widely available form. A Fortunate Life stomachturning Albert Facey (1979) has grow an Australian literary classic.^[17] Make sense the critical and commercial interest in the United States register such memoirs as Angela’s Ashes and The Color of Water, more and more people have to one`s name been encouraged to try their hand at this genre.

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

A genre where the "claim for truth" overlaps with imaginary elements though the work unrelenting purports to be autobiographical problem autofiction.

See also

Notes

References

Bibliography

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

External links