An autobiography

An autobiography (from the Greek, αὐτός-autos self + βίος-bios life + γράφειν-graphein to write) is a written account of the life of a person written by that person.

Contents [hide]

1 Origin of the term

2 Autobiography through the ages

2.1 The classical period: Apologia, oration, confession

2.2 Early autobiographies

2.3 Memoirs

2.4 18th and 19th centuries

2.5 20th and 21st centuries

3 Nature of autobiography

4 Fictional autobiography

5 See also

6 Notes and references

7 Bibliography

8 Further reading

Origin of the term[edit]

The word 'autobiography' was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the English periodical the Monthly Review, when he suggested the word as a hybrid but condemned it as 'pedantic'; but its next recorded use was in its present sense by Robert Southey in 1809.[1] The form of autobiography however goes back to antiquity. Biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints; an autobiography, however, may be based entirely on the writer's memory. Closely associated with autobiography (and sometimes difficult to precisely distinguish from it) is the form of memoir.

See also: List of autobiographies and Category:Autobiographies for examples. -

Autobiography through the ages[edit]

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The classical period: Apologia, oration, confession[edit]

In antiquity such works were typically entitled apologia, purporting to be self-justification rather than self-documentation. John Henry Newman's autobiography (first published in 1864) is entitled Apologia Pro Vita Sua in reference to this tradition.

The pagan rhetor Libanius (c. 314–394) framed his life memoir (Oration I begun in 374) as one of his orations, not of a public kind, but of a literary kind that could not be aloud in privacy.

Augustine (354–430) applied the title Confessions to his autobiographical work, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the same title in the 18th century, initiating the chain of confessional and sometimes racy and highly self-critical, autobiographies of the Romantic era and beyond.

In the spirit of Augustine's Confessions is the 12th-century Historia Calamitatum of Peter Abelard, outstanding as an autobiographical document of its period.

Early autobiographies[edit]

A scene from the Baburnama

The first autobiographical work in Islamic society was written in the late 11th century, by Abdallah ibn Buluggin, last Zirid king of Granada.

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

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

One of the first great autobiographies of the Renaissance is that of the sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), written between 1556 and 1558, and entitled by him simply Vita (Italian: Life). He declares at the start: "No matter what sort he is, everyone who has to his credit what are or really seem great achievements, if he cares for truth and goodness, ought to write the story of his own life in his own hand; but no one should venture on such a splendid undertaking before he is over forty."[2] These criteria for autobiography generally persisted until recent times, and most serious autobiographies of the next three hundred years conformed to them.

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

The earliest known autobiography in English is the early 15th-century Book of Margery Kempe, describing among other things Kempe's pilgrimage to the Holy Land and visit to Rome. The book remained in manuscript and was not published until 1936.

Notable English autobiographies of the 17th century include those of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1643, published 1764) and John Bunyan (Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, 1666).

Memoirs[edit]

Main article: Memoir

A memoir is slightly different in character from

...