ABSTRACT
SCHOLARSHIP ON AMERICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY DURING THE LAST FORTY YEARS IS itself a rags-to-riches narrative; interest in the subject has expanded rapidly since the early 1960s. The focus of the New Criticism on the formal analysis of poetry, drama, and the novel tended to push autobiography to the margins of literary studies, leaving it to biographers and historians. Stephen Shapiro was certainly over-stating the case in 1968 when he called autobiography a “Dark Continent,” for American autobiography had already begun to be mapped by two major bibliographies.2 Since the mid-1970s, however, autobiography in general and American autobiography in particular have become the subjects of intense scholarly activity.3 The notion of autobiography as a strict representation of biographical facts has all but disappeared, but the debate concerning the degree to which autobiography is distinct from fiction has continued in numerous books and essays.4 Many studies have related the theoretical concerns of autobiography more specifically to American literature and culture.5 Meanwhile, the efforts of scholars to recover and interpret representative texts by African Americans have contributed significantly to the renewed interest in first-person narratives as documentary evidence rather than as a species of fiction.6 More recently, comparable efforts to reconstruct the traditions of women’s autobiography have been undertaken successfully.7 Within little more than a quarter-century, then, autobiography has become one of the most active fields of literary theory and American cultural studies.
