Etymological definition of autobiography in literature

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Roesler, Wolfgang Schneider, Manfred Die erkaltete Herzensschrift: Der autobiographische Text im Shumaker, Wayne English Autobiography. Autobiography is a significant genre in literature. Its significance or importance lies in authenticity, veracity, and personal testimonies. The reason is that people write about challenges they encounter in their life and the ways to tackle them.

This shows the veracity and authenticity that is required of a piece of writing to make it eloquent, persuasive, and convincing. In her autobiography, The Story of My LifeHelen Keller recounts her first twenty years, beginning with the events of the childhood illness that left her deaf and blind. Medieval Chronicles: Autobiographical accounts of historical events by chroniclers and scribes.

Renaissance and Enlightenment: During the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, the concept of autobiography as a literary genre began to take shape: Montaigne's "Essais" : Personal and philosophical reflections that reveal much about Montaigne's life and character. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Confessions" : A radical and influential autobiography that exposed the author's inner thoughts and experiences.

An autobiography[ a ] sometimes informally called an autobiois a self-written biography of one's own life.

Etymological definition of autobiography in literature

The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in in the English periodical The Monthly Reviewwhen he suggested the word as a hybrid, but condemned it as "pedantic". However, its next recorded use was in its present sense, by Robert Southey in Roy Pascal differentiates autobiography from the periodic self-reflective mode of journal or diary writing by noting that "[autobiography] is a review of a life from a particular moment in time, while the diary, however reflective it may be, moves through a series of moments in time".

While biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints, autobiography may be based entirely on the writer's memory. The memoir form is closely associated with autobiography but it tends, as Pascal claims, to focus less on the self and more on others during the autobiographer's review of their own life. Autobiographical works are by nature subjective.

The inability—or unwillingness—of the author to accurately recall memories has in certain cases resulted in misleading or incorrect information. Some sociologists and psychologists have noted that autobiography offers the author the ability to recreate history. Spiritual autobiography is an account of an author's struggle or journey towards God, followed by conversion a religious conversion, often interrupted by moments of regression.

The author re-frames their life as a demonstration of divine intention through encounters with the Divine. The earliest example of a spiritual autobiography is Augustine's Confessions though the tradition has expanded to include other religious traditions in works such as Mohandas Gandhi 's An Autobiography and Black Elk 's Black Elk Speaks. Deliverance from Error by Al-Ghazali is another example.

The spiritual autobiography often serves as an endorsement of the writer's religion. A memoir is slightly different in character from an autobiography. While an autobiography typically focuses on the "life and times" of the writer, a memoir has a narrower, more intimate focus on the author's memories, feelings and emotions. Memoirs have often been written by politicians or military leaders as a way to record and publish an account of their public exploits.

In the work, Caesar describes the battles that took place during the nine years that he spent fighting local armies in the Gallic Wars. His second memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili or Commentaries on the Civil War is an account of the events that took place between 49 and 48 BC in the civil war against Gnaeus Pompeius and the Senate. French examples from the same period include the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz — and the Duc de Saint-Simon.

The term "fictional autobiography" signifies novels about a fictional character written as though the character were writing their own autobiography, meaning that the character is the first-person narrator and that the novel addresses both internal and external experiences of the character. Daniel Defoe 's Moll Flanders is an early example.