Book contents
- Byron in Context
- Byron in Context
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Chronology
- Abbreviations and Note on the Text
- Introduction
- Part I Life and Works
- Part II Political, Social and Intellectual Transformations
- Part III Literary Cultures
- Chapter 17 Classicism and Neoclassicism
- Chapter 18 Epic (and Historiography)
- Chapter 19 Romance
- Chapter 20 Byron’s Lyric Practice
- Chapter 21 Satire
- Chapter 22 The Satanic School
- Chapter 23 The Lake Poets
- Chapter 24 Byron’s Accidental Muse
- Chapter 25 “Benign Ceruleans of the Second Sex!”
- Chapter 26 The Pisan Circle and the Cockney School
- Chapter 27 Drama and Theater
- Chapter 28 Autobiography
- Chapter 29 “Literatoor” and Literary Theory
- Chapter 30 Periodical Culture, the Literary Review and the Mass Media
- Part IV Reception and Afterlives
- Further Reading
- Index
Chapter 28 - Autobiography
from Part III - Literary Cultures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 October 2019
- Byron in Context
- Byron in Context
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Chronology
- Abbreviations and Note on the Text
- Introduction
- Part I Life and Works
- Part II Political, Social and Intellectual Transformations
- Part III Literary Cultures
- Chapter 17 Classicism and Neoclassicism
- Chapter 18 Epic (and Historiography)
- Chapter 19 Romance
- Chapter 20 Byron’s Lyric Practice
- Chapter 21 Satire
- Chapter 22 The Satanic School
- Chapter 23 The Lake Poets
- Chapter 24 Byron’s Accidental Muse
- Chapter 25 “Benign Ceruleans of the Second Sex!”
- Chapter 26 The Pisan Circle and the Cockney School
- Chapter 27 Drama and Theater
- Chapter 28 Autobiography
- Chapter 29 “Literatoor” and Literary Theory
- Chapter 30 Periodical Culture, the Literary Review and the Mass Media
- Part IV Reception and Afterlives
- Further Reading
- Index
Summary
Though autobiography was first named as such in 1797, and defined in the modern sense by Robert Southey in 1809 (OED), its history goes back to antiquity. The two principal models of “self-writing” handed down to the Romantics by the eighteenth century were Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67). Rousseau’s model of autobiography sets “before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature,” that man being the author, who shows himself “as [he] was,” “unveil[ing his] innermost self” and revealing “the secrets of [his] heart” – “mean and contemptible, good, high-minded and sublime” as these might be. The Shandyean model of autobiography, offered through the novel’s eponymous fictional autobiographer, explores and reflects on the complexities thrown up by any attempt to form, narrativize or communicate a coherent self and its history; with “fifty things to let you know,” a “hundred difficulties” to “clear up,” a “thousand distresses and domestic adventures crowding in,” “thick and threefold, one upon the neck of the other,” the “sport of small accidents, Tristram Shandy” repeatedly finds “I am lost myself.” Revealing the intimacies of the self and/or reflecting on selfhood per se (though not generally in Sterne’s humorous mode) were to become key tropes of Romantic autobiography from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) to de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), William Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris (1823) and Wordsworth’s 1850 Prelude.
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- Byron in Context , pp. 230 - 237Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019