ABSTRACT
To begin a discussion of potential approaches historians might take in reading autobiography, we must first acknowledge that autobiography (perhaps more than any other non-fiction genre) has been a form notoriously resistant to precise definition.1 Indeed, surveying the critical history, one finds scholars struggling almost as mightily to determine the boundaries between autobiography and other forms of writing as to determine what type of knowledge can be gleaned from reading autobiographical texts themselves. The term ‘autobiography’, we should note, is of relatively modern origin. Probably first used in English by the poet Robert Southey in 1809, it only appeared in wide circulation during the 1830s.2 Even then, however, the precise meaning of the word was a source of debate. The history of texts that might be labelled autobiographical has been traced back (by Georg Misch and Avram Fleischman) as far as ancient Egypt or Nineveh.3 However, many other critics (such as James Olney) view Augustine’s Confessions as the best origin point for the history of the genre.4 And still other commentators (Georges Gusdorf, Karl Weintraub) have argued that truly ‘autobiographical’ writing (which, they contend, takes as its object the individualistic self of post-Enlightenment Europe) dates only from the eighteenth century, with the works of writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Benjamin Franklin.5 What these divergent claims illustrate, of course, is the truly varied nature of autobiographical discourse. Even if most critics would agree that autobiography is a kind of narrative that aspires truthfully to relate the story of an individual life, and where the writer of that story takes his or her own distinct experience of selfhood as the central subject, the historical contingency of those very categories (‘narrative’, ‘self’, ‘individual’, ‘life’, and ‘truth’) has made autobiography a focal point for scholarly debate. Particularly in the wake of the many varieties of postmodern theory addressed in the introductory chapters of this volume, autobiography has become a problematic, but increasingly rich, type of source material for historical study.
