Autobiography

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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

General

• Autobiography, Autobiographicality, and Self-Representation
• Beginnings, Myths of Childhood, and Autobiography
• The Invention of Childhood in Victorian Autobiography
• Credence and Credibility: The Concern for Honesty in Victorian Autobiography
• Ulysses to Penelope: Victorian Experiments in Autobiography
• Childhood as a Personal Myth in Autobiography
• The Problematic Relationship of Autobiographer to Audience
• Victorian Autobiography as Victorian
• Autobiography, Fiction, Nonfiction, and the Visual Arts
• Autobiographical Uses of Images and Paradigms — Journeys and Shipwrecks

Individual autobiographers and their autobiographical works

• Wordsworth's The Prelude and the linear life-as-progress paradigm
• Biblical Typology and the Self-Portrait of the Poet in Robert Browning
• Autobiographical Patterns in Carlyle's French Revolution
• Problems of Autobiography and Fictional Autobiography in Aurora Leigh
• Suggested Readings
• 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
• The Structure of Ruskin's Praeterita

Related Material

• The Adult’s Construction of the Inner World of the Child: Insights from Nineteenth-Century Autobiographical Literature

Reviews

• Philip Holden's Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State
• James O'Rourke's Sex, Lies, & Autobiography: The Ethics of Confession

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Last modified 17 November 2012