But what has this to do with my early years in London? In a way, nothing at all; but as life is full of parentheses, so, if true to its original, must autobiography be also. — Laurence Housman
Strong testimony to the pitfalls and paradoxes of self-knowledge comes from the fact that two of the words we use to refer to what is most individual about us — our “personality” and “character” — originally refer to what is by definition least individual. The value of a character, in its primary sense of an inscribed mark or, later, a bit of metal type, is that it is a replica, and immediately identifiable as such. Similarly, the function of the persona — the mask worn by actors in the theatre of the ancient world — was to obscure the individuality of the actor in favour of the universality of the character presented. Even in ordinary usage, a “persona” is something that one constructs and projects, while a character is something we “show”. — Guy Dammann, Times Literary Supplement (29 October 2010): 17
Matters of genre and style
- Autobiography, Autobiographicality, and Self-Representation
- Autobiography principally a matter of interpretation rather than narration
- A curious paradox: autobiography, apparently the most personal and individual of literary genres, is in fact a highly conventional, even prescriptive form
- Beginnings, Myths of Childhood, and Autobiography
- Testing and rejecting interpretive possibilities characteristic of later Victorian autobiographies
- Credence and Credibility: The Concern for Honesty in Victorian Autobiography
- Ulysses to Penelope: Victorian Experiments in Autobiography
- Convergence of novel and autobiography at the end of the nineteenth century
- The autobiography of textual encounter
- The structure of spiritual autobiography
- Martineau revises the conventions of the spiritual autobiography
- The Problematic Relationship of Autobiographer to Audience
- Autobiographers "accommodate" prior literary texts as they create their own
- Victorian Autobiography as Victorian
- Autobiography, Fiction, Nonfiction, and the Visual Arts
- On the supposed difference between Protestant and Roman Catholic spiritual autobiographies
- Newman transfers the Apologia from an English Protestant tradition to a Catholic literary form
Image, symbol, and motif
- Exodus and flight from slavery
- The Fall
- Autobiographical Uses of Images and Paradigms — Journeys and Shipwrecks
- Childhood as a Personal Myth in Autobiography
- The Invention of Childhood in Victorian Autobiography
Victorian autobiographies
- Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
- Charles Darwin's Autobiography
- Francis Galton's Memories of My Life
- Edmund Gosse's Father and Son
- Harriet Martineau's Autobiography
- John Henry Newman's Apologia pro vita sua
- John Ruskin's Praeterita
- Herbert Spencer's Autobiography
Autobiographical fiction
Victorian fiction and nonfiction with autobiographical elements
- Problems of Autobiography and Fictional Autobiography in Aurora Leigh
- Biblical Typology and the Self-Portrait of the Poet in Robert Browning
- Autobiographical Patterns in Carlyle's French Revolution
- Wordsworth's The Prelude and the linear life-as-progress paradigm
- Autobiography Into Autobiography: The Evolution of David Copperfield
- Autobiographical Elements in Dickens's Great Expectations
- Great Expectations and Fictional Autobiography: Dickens's Fantasy and Nightmare
Particularly influential pre-Victorian autobiographies
- St. Augustine's Confessions
- John Bunyan's Grace Abounding as major influence
- Philip Doddridge's The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul
- John Newton's An Authentic Narrative
- Thomas Scott's The Force of Truth
Bibliographies
- Victorian and Edwardian Autobiographies
- Some Pre-Victorian Autobiographies
- Selected Secondary Material
- Autobiography and Gender
Related Material
Reviews
- Philip Holden's Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State
- James O'Rourke's Sex, Lies, & Autobiography: The Ethics of Confession
Last modified 10 February 2014