The Oxford Companion to English Literature | autobiography
autobiography
in its modern form may be taken as writing that purposefully and self-consciously provides an account of the author's life and incorporates feeling and introspection as well as empirical detail. In this sense autobiographies are infrequent in English much before
1800
. Although there are examples of autobiography in a quasi-modern sense earlier than this (e.g.
Bunyan's
conversion narrative
Grace Abounding
,
1666
, and
Margaret
Cavendish
's ‘A True Relation’,
1655
–
6
) it is not until the early 19th cent. that the genre becomes established in English writing:
Gibbon
's Memoirs (
1796
) are a notable exception.
From
1800
onwards the introspective Protestantism of an earlier period and the Romantic movement's displeasure with the fact/feeling distinction of the Enlightenment provided for personal narratives of a largely new kind. They were characterized by a self-scrutiny and vivid sentiment...
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