ABSTRACT
The term history instead uses the term evolution because the concept of an evolution of the autobiography up to the eighteenth century is scarcely to be justified. This chapter talks about an autobiography which reviews a whole life as the shaping and fruition of a specific skill devoted to one absorbing enterprise. Autobiography becomes not only an account of things done or known, an exposition of a personality, but a search for the true self, and a means to come to terms with it. A large number of great autobiographies were written, true "classics" in the usual sense of the term, but that this period may properly be called an "age" of great autobiography. The Prelude, as the author of Tintern Abbey, who distinguishes stages of growth and who celebrates the man's appropriation of the past in a fuller understanding. Goethe's Poetry and Truth is far broader-based and more factual than the autobiographies of Rousseau and Wordsworth.
