Victorian Autobiography Criticism
Victorian autobiography, hailed as a golden age for the genre, reflects a deep engagement with personal growth and societal influences, expanding the legacy of Romantic introspection with a focus on progress and development. As noted in Introduction: The Hermeneutic Imperative, Victorian autobiography was interpretive, rooted in earlier spiritual autobiographies but distinct in its avoidance of the confessional style typified by St. Augustine's Confessions. Instead, works like John Henry Newman's Apologia pro vita sua and Charles Darwin's Autobiography showcase the period's preference for objective self-justification over introspective guilt.
The genre also served as a vehicle for social critique, particularly in the autobiographies of women and the working class, as explored by critics such as Estelle C. Jelinek and Julia Swindells. These writings often combined traditional literary forms with an intention to advance women's rights and critique societal norms. Works like John Stuart Mill's Autobiography illustrate the era's bourgeois ideals of masculinity, discussed by Martin Danahay, while those by female authors frequently justified their literary pursuits in a male-dominated society.
The intricate relationship between autobiography and fiction in Victorian literature has been a rich area for scholarly inquiry. Authors like Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Thomas Carlyle crafted narratives that blurred the lines between personal history and fictional storytelling. As Robert Tracy examines, these narratives often shared themes of identity formation and self-awareness, capturing readers' imaginations by tracing protagonists' journeys from adversity to maturity, a hallmark of the Bildungsroman genre.
Contents
- Representative Works
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Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
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Introduction: The Hermeneutic Imperative
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Peterson defines Victorian autobiography as principally a hermeneutic and interpretive, rather than a representative, genre and surveys its literary origins in the spiritual autobiographies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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Monologism and Power in Victorian Autobiography
(summary)
In the following essay, Danahay focuses on the tension between the monologic and dialogic (and likewise the unitary and social) qualities of language illustrated in the autobiographical works of John Stuart Mill, Edmund Gosse, and Matthew Arnold.
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Why Do We Remember Forwards and Not Backwards?
(summary)
In the following essay, Davis identifies the major stylistic and formal limitations of Victorian autobiography, particularly highlighting the genre's strict adherence to linearity and its inability to bridge ancient and modern conceptions of the self.
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Introduction: The Hermeneutic Imperative
(summary)
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Criticism: Autobiography And The Self
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Carlyle and Nietzsche: The Subject Retailored
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Jay outlines Thomas Carlyle's ironic critique of Romantic autobiographical subjectivity in his Sartor Resartus.
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The Self as Other
(summary)
In the following essay, Folkenflik studies the treatment of alterity and the self in autobiographical narratives from St. Augustine to Jean-Paul Sartre, with primary reference to several Victorian autobiographers.
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Cold Print: Professing Authorship in Anthony Trollope's An Autobiography
(summary)
In the following essay, Aguirre probes the relationship between the writer, authorial identity, and the realities of the literary marketplace with regard to Anthony Trollope's An Autobiography.
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Carlyle and Nietzsche: The Subject Retailored
(summary)
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Criticism: Autobiography And Gender
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The Nineteenth Century: New Voices
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Jelinek surveys autobiographical writings by English women of the nineteenth century, concluding with a summary of their contributions to the genre.
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Class, Gender, and the Victorian Masculine Subject
(summary)
In the following essay, Danahay discusses the masculine, bourgeois ideals of individual autonomy constructed in the autobiographical works of Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, and Edmund Gosse, comparing these with the feminine, communal subjectivity of Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography.
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The Nineteenth Century: New Voices
(summary)
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Criticism: Autobiography And Class
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Women's Issues
(summary)
In the following excerpt from her book-length study of Victorian working women's writing, Swindells explores the various literary modes adapted by nineteenth-century women autobiographers (from romance and melodrama to religious discourse), and describes these writers' interest in the advancement of women's rights through their literary pursuits.
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The Literary Standard, Working-Class Lifewriting, and Gender
(summary)
In the following essay, Gagnier evaluates the extent to which nineteenth-century working-class writers of autobiography adopted bourgeois gender ideology in their works.
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A Different Form of ‘Self’: Narrative Style in British Nineteenth-Century Working-class Autobiography
(summary)
In the following essay, Hackett emphasizes the didactic and socially critical functions of narrative in British working-class autobiography of the nineteenth century.
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Women's Issues
(summary)
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Criticism: Autobiography And Fiction
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Stranger Than Truth: Fictional Autobiography and Autobiographical Fiction
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In the following essay, Tracy compares Charles Dickens's novel David Copperfield and Anthony Trollope's An Autobiography in order to suggest generic affinities and distinctions between autobiographical fiction and autobiography.
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The Mirror in The Mill on the Floss: Toward a Reading of Autobiography as Discourse
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In the following essay, Carlisle analyzes the autobiographical structural patterns, action, and characterization of George Eliot's novel The Mill on the Floss.
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The Trials of Vision: Experience and Autobiography in Charlotte Brontë and Charlotte Tonna
(summary)
In the following essay, Murphy considers the nature of Victorian literary self-representation through comparison of Charlotte Brontë's semi-autobiographical novel Jane Eyre and Charlotte Tonna's spiritual autobiography Personal Recollections.
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Stranger Than Truth: Fictional Autobiography and Autobiographical Fiction
(summary)
- Further Reading