autobiography

an account of a person's life written or otherwise recorded by that person

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Autobiography

a description of one’s own life; a literary genre similar to memoirs but differing from them in a greater emphasis on the author’s person and psychology.

Examples of autobiographies are Saint Augustine’s Confessions (397–398), P. Abélard’s Historia Calamitatum (1132–36), and B. Cellini’s The Life of Benvenuto (1558–66). The first Russian autobiography was The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum (1672–75). In modern literature J.-J. Rousseau and A. I. Herzen have created literary autobiographical confessions. Some works of L. N. Tolstoy, M. Gorky, K. G. Paustovskii, M. Proust, and other writers are autobiographical in character. The autobiographies of the revolutionary figures G. Garibaldi, P. A. Kropotkin, and A. Bebel have been translated into many languages.

The word “autobiography” may also refer to a brief chronological summary of the chief events of one’s life.

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References in periodicals archive

The first part of Beloved Writing offers to the reader two autobiographic pieces.

Dacia Maraini. Beloved Writing: Fifty Years of Engagement

As Gullestad (2005) points out, a significant part of autobiographic accounts is devoted to childhood, and the reflection afforded by writing can be viewed as a dialogue between the child the author was and the adult they became.

Teaching arithmetic at primary schools in the nineteenth century: the memoirs of Humberto de Campos/Ensino da aritmetica na escola de primeiras letras no seculo XIX: as memorias de Humberto de Campos/Ensenanza de la aritmetica en la escuela primaria en el siglo XIX: las memorias de Humberto de Campos

She changed all names and did not mention a specific location to hide her autobiographic story full of painful memories that the girl Suwaed embodied, which were her own.

The Exploitation of Women and Social Change in the Writing of Nawal El-Saadawi

It is closest to the classical autobiographic narrative: highly conventionalized narrative-wise, written in the Past tense, emotionally calculated ("I tried to sound cheerful and articulate") and objective-like.

Narrating motherhood as experience and institution: experimental life-writing in Mary Kelly's Post-partum document (1973-79)

The scientists found that compared to participants who did not drink, those who reported consuming light or moderate amounts of alcohol in older age had a larger hippocampus, a key memory region of the brain, and better memory for autobiographic events, such as times, places, and emotions.

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The social and historic circumstances of her childhood and youth that she describes in her autobiographic book entitled Ai suru (that means "to love" in Japanese) resemble the feudal, isolated anachronistic Japanese society of the first half of the nineteenth century from certain points of view.

Ume Tsuda and Ioana Nitobe Garrison--identity recovered in the land of the other

Among others, 1000Memories, which is owned by Ancestry.com, invites friends of the deceased to submit photos and stories, and Bcelebrated lets the user create their own autobiographic sites.

How to save and protect your digital afterlife

"My sculpture so far has been essentially autobiographic, my life in Makkah.

Noha Al-Sharif -- an expert in Islamic sculpture