ABSTRACT
This book’s concluding chapter has three functions. First, thematically and chronologically, it links autobiography’s emergence in the eighteenth century to the simultaneous emergence of art criticism and the novel. Second, it ties these genres to the consolidation of the sensibility of sincerity, meaning truth-telling that prioritizes correspondence between outer expression and inner self. And third, it returns us to the twenty-first century by examining this sensibility’s stability in autobiography-as-genre over three centuries, in contrast to radical shifts in autobiography-as-business in the last 30 years.
