THE HISTORY OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The History of Autobiography

The History of Autobiography

The autobiography in the strict sense of the word has been slow to win, even if one can find many ancient works that liken them.

The Greco-Latin has many autobiographical texts which are more memoirs that kind of intimate autobiography: one can cite, for example, Xenophon's Anabasis, in which it tells the dispatch with which the Ten Thousand he attended and where he talks about himself in third person; method imitated by Julius Caesar in the narratives of the wars he conducted, particularly in the Gallic War, or Josephus or Libanius some texts have was very late entitled "Autobiography". (Olney, 1998)

The literature of the early Christian centuries led by the religious practice of confession of sins and the desire to offer models of life saved, produced in the fourth century, Augustine's Confessions. However the work does not correspond exactly to the criteria of autobiography: indeed, although one of the first works of introspection, Augustine's Confessions are not intended to focus on the singularity of the individual author, but rather to present his life as an intellectual journey and spiritual characteristic of the human condition in general, they fall over in a religious approach to convince the reader of the importance of redemption. (Lejeune, 1988)

In the middle ages the autobiographical texts are rare, although some works are attested from the twelfth century (with, for example, the Historia calamitatum or narrative of my misfortunes of Peter Abelard). British literature, meanwhile, has, from the fifteenth and especially the seventeenth century, many personal narratives, often inspired by religion, Catholics and especially Protestants, whose main were identified and analyzed.

In the sixteenth century, humanism, the kind asserted by the interest centered on the individual. We see it with his Essays Montaigne and, although no timeline defend us to affix the name of autobiography in the strict sense. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, remain as ever and great French memoirists (Blaise Montluc, Cardinal de Retz, Duke of Saint-Simon), the classical period design applying more of Blaise Pascal that "The self is hateful." (Buckley, 1994)

It was later, in the second half of the eighteenth century - 1782-1789 published posthumously - that Rousseau wrote the Confessions with the first real autobiography - in the modern sense, that is to say a kind that defines, indeed, the claimed identity of the narrator and the author represented by an "I" unique, but also ...