Autobiography"Autobiography examines the theory and practice of autobiographical writing from St. Augustine to the present. Linda Anderson offers a lucid discussion of: developments in autobiographical criticism in the last thirty years and the main theoretical issues and concepts in this area; the different forms of the genre, from confessions and narratives to memoirs and diaries; uses of the genre in their historical and cultural contexts; the major writers of the historical tradition of autobiography, including St. Augustine, Bunyan, Boswell, Rousseau, and Wordsworth as well as non-canonical texts by women; twentieth-century autobiography, including women's writing, black and postcolonial writing, photography, personal criticism, and testimonial writing; the ideological assumptions about the nature of self that underlie autobiographical texts. Combining theoretical discussion with thought-provoking readings of major texts, this is the ideal introduction to the study of a fascinating genre."--Publisher's description. |
Contents
The Law of Genre | 7 |
Historians of the Self | 18 |
John Bunyans Grace Abounding | 27 |
James Boswell and Hester Thrale | 33 |
Rousseau and Wordsworth | 43 |
Subjectivity Representation and Narrative | 60 |
Other Subjects | 92 |
Practising Autobiography | 121 |
GLOSSARY | 134 |
142 | |
150 | |
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Common terms and phrases
already argued attempt Augustine 1961 Augustine's auto autobiographical text autobiographical writing autobiography becomes biography body Boswell Bunyan Camera Lucida childhood claim Confessions cultural DECONSTRUCTION diary discourse experience Felman feminine feminism feminist criticism fiction fragmented Freud gender genre Gilroy Grace Abounding Hester Thrale Hurston ibid identity ideology important individual interpretation Jacques Derrida Jacques Lacan Johnson Julia Julia Kristeva Karl Weintraub Lacan language literary lives Louis Althusser meaning memory Miller mirror stage mother Naipaul narrative nature never notion offer Olney Ondaatje paradoxically particular past Paul Gilroy Perec personal criticism perspective photograph political position poststructuralism poststructuralist present problem Probyn prosopopoeia psychoanalysis question reader relation represent rhetoric Roland Barthes role Romantic Rousseau Sean Burke seen selfhood sexual difference Sigmund Freud simply social speak Steedman story suggests theoretical theory Thrale tradition transcendent trauma truth turns unconscious understanding unified woman women Woolf words Wordsworth