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 significant form of discourse in almost every religious tradition during the twentieth century, and its many forms and recurring themes raise crucial religious issues. This article first discusses Christian and Islamic autobiography, then turns to examples of life writing in Asian and Native American cultures, and finally discusses the religious significance of this literary genre.
The question of how to define autobiography is highly contested. By its most precise and restricted definition, autobiography is, according to Philippe Lejeune's On Autobiography (1989), "a retrospective prose narrative that someone writes concerning his own existence, where the focus is the individual life, in particular the story of his personality." Many scholars follow Karl Weintraub in seeing "true" autobiography as tied to the development of the ideas of individuality and historicity, and therefore as an essentially Western form of discourse. Yet there is a great deal of writing that intentionally reveals the author's character in different ways than classical Western autobiography, and these representations of the author's self will be considered here as forms of religious autobiography.
