Compares a number of Victorian autobiographies and explores the boundaries of the genre.
Victorian autobiographies have provoked ever-increasing scholarly and critical interest in recent years. Their authors underwent spiritual and mental crises, lived out Romantic and biblical myths, and followed historical and scientific paradigms as well as the dynamic patterns of their own philosophies.
In Victorian Autobiography Clinton Machann challenges recent popular approaches to the Victorian autobiography which treat the genre ahistorically or as a subgenre of fiction. Machann argues instead for considering the autobiography as a historically defined genre, one which can profitably be studied as non-fiction, and as a referential art.
The book is a comparative study of eleven autobiographies, including those of John Stuart Mill, Anthony Trollope, John Ruskin, and Charles Darwin, among other luminaries of the Victorian era. Juxtaposing well-known works with less familiar ones, Machann helps the reader to explore the boundaries of the genre, appreciate stylistic variations, and identify profound structural similarities.
The book will be of interest to students of the Victorian era as well as to scholars of life-writing and historical constructions of the self.
". . . this book can serve both advanced students and scholars as a clear and reliable introduction to the lively field of nineteenth-century autobiography."
---David DeLaura, University of Pennsylvania
Clinton Machann is Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University.
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6 x 9, ca 160 pagesISBN 0-472-10565-5
cloth 34.50E (tentative)
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