Autobiography Summary

Autobiography AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Autobiography is a form of religious literature with an ancient lineage in the Christian, Islamic, and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. It became an increasingly common and si... Read more

In the following essay, Stone identifies major works of American autobiography, offers a definition of the genre, and discusses some leading critical approaches to the subject. One of the striking and... Read more

In the following essay, Cooke discusses the autobiographical writings of Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Eldridge Cleaver, three African American writers who have made "evolutionary contribution... Read more

In the following essay, Spengemann and Lundquist relate American autobiographical writings to the development of the American cultural myth that "in its most general form, describes human histo... Read more

In the following essay, Dolan discusses the influence of autobiographical writings—particularly Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return (1934), Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast ... Read more

In the essay that follows, Georgi-Findlay examines the American frontier experience from the perspective of a Native American woman—Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins—using her Life among the Piut... Read more

In the following excerpt, originally written in 1955, Jackson examines the complex issue of the authenticity of Black Hawk's memoirs. Since the first appearance of the autobiography [Life of Ma... Read more

In the essay that follows, Ruoff contends that Native American autobiographies became more intensely focused on Native American-white political relations, and more self-reflectively literary, over the... Read more

In the excerpt that follows, Peyer provides a historical account of Native American autobiography, with primary consideration of its political implications. To the white man many things done by the I... Read more

In the excerpt below, Sands argues for the importance of Native American women's narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing in particular on Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins'... Read more

In the excerpt below, Peterson explores the structure and subject matter of women's autobiographies and notes the differences between women's and men's writings. What is women�... Read more

In the essay below, Valman considers the Evangelical Revival and argues that the publication of alleged autobiographies by Jewish women who had converted to Christianity was a means the Evangelicals u... Read more

In the following essay, Schlissel discusses the usefulness of diaries in the study of the impact of Western migration on nineteenth-century women. This book began with a fascination for the diaries of... Read more

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 ... Read more

In the following essay, Hackett emphasizes the didactic and socially critical functions of narrative in British working-class autobiography of the nineteenth century. Francis Russell Hart noted that &... Read more

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 inabi... Read more

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. The subjective autobiogra... Read more

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... Read more