Peter Childs
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748620432
- eISBN:
- 9780748671700
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748620432.003.0015
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The study of autobiography has been resurgent in recent decades, and the genre is often now discussed by historians, literary critics and others alongside biographies, memoirs, letters, diaries, and ...
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The study of autobiography has been resurgent in recent decades, and the genre is often now discussed by historians, literary critics and others alongside biographies, memoirs, letters, diaries, and reminiscences – as well as works more conventionally considered ‘history’ or ‘fiction’ -- under the banner of life writing (the term ‘self-life-writing’ is Avrom Fleishman’s). One reason for this is the rise of interdisciplinary areas of study that have found autobiography to be a particularly useful form of writing, and so have accorded it a distinctive place in the study of both authenticity and alterity. In the 1970s, women’s studies, American studies, ethnic and black studies all started to turn to autobiography for voices of ‘experience’ from within, as James Olney sees it. Or, as Martin Amis puts it in his own Experience: ‘what everyone has in them, these days, is not a novel but a memoir. We live in an age of mass loquacity. We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de Coeur. Nothing, for now, can compete with experience – so unanswerably authentic, and so liberally and democratically dispensed.’Less
The study of autobiography has been resurgent in recent decades, and the genre is often now discussed by historians, literary critics and others alongside biographies, memoirs, letters, diaries, and reminiscences – as well as works more conventionally considered ‘history’ or ‘fiction’ -- under the banner of life writing (the term ‘self-life-writing’ is Avrom Fleishman’s). One reason for this is the rise of interdisciplinary areas of study that have found autobiography to be a particularly useful form of writing, and so have accorded it a distinctive place in the study of both authenticity and alterity. In the 1970s, women’s studies, American studies, ethnic and black studies all started to turn to autobiography for voices of ‘experience’ from within, as James Olney sees it. Or, as Martin Amis puts it in his own Experience: ‘what everyone has in them, these days, is not a novel but a memoir. We live in an age of mass loquacity. We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de Coeur. Nothing, for now, can compete with experience – so unanswerably authentic, and so liberally and democratically dispensed.’
