The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography offers a historical overview of the genre from the foundational works of Augustine, Montaigne, and Rousseau through the great autobiographies of the Romantic, Victorian, and modern eras. Sixteen essays from distinguished scholars and critics explore the diverse forms, audiences, styles, and motives of life writings traditionally classified under the rubric of autobiography. Chapters are arranged in chronological order and are grouped to reflect changing views of the psychological status, representative character, and moral authority of the autobiographical text. The volume closes with a group portrait of late-modernist and contemporary autobiographies that, by blurring the dividing line between fiction and non-fiction, expand our understanding of the genre. Accessibly written and comprehensive in scope, the volume will appeal especially to students and teachers of non-fiction narrative, creative writing, and literature more broadly.
This volume offers sixteen original essays that attest to the extraordinary inventiveness and range of modernist autobiography. It examines the ways modernist writers chose to tell their life stories, with particular attention to forms, venues, modes of address, and degrees of truthfulness. The essays are grouped around a set of rubrics that isolate the distinctive character and shared preoccupations of modernist life-writings: questions of ancestry and tradition that foreground the modernists' troubled relation to their immediate familial as well as cultural past; their emergence as writers whose experiences found expression in untraditional and singular forms; their sense of themselves as survivors of personal and historical traumas; and their burdens as self-chroniclers of loss, especially of self-loss. It will appeal especially to scholars and students of literary modernism and English literature more generally.
The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography offers a historical overview of the genre from the foundational works of Augustine, Montaigne, and Rousseau through the great autobiographies of the Romantic, Victorian, and modern eras. Sixteen essays from distinguished scholars and critics explore the diverse forms, audiences, styles, and motives of life writings traditionally classified under the rubric of autobiography. Chapters are arranged in chronological order and are grouped to reflect changing views of the psychological status, representative character, and moral authority of the autobiographical text. The volume closes with a group portrait of late-modernist and contemporary autobiographies that, by blurring the dividing line between fiction and non-fiction, expand our understanding of the genre. Accessibly written and comprehensive in scope, the volume will appeal especially to students and teachers of non-fiction narrative, creative writing, and literature more broadly.
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