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British Autobiography, 1864-1914

出版	University of Alberta, 1974
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=JxK-0AEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋This thesis is an attempt to write the literary history of autobiography in Britain in the half-century before the Great War, and to examine the artistic and critical problems raised by works such as the Apologia of Newman, Ruskin's Praeterita , Carlyle's Reminiscences , George Moore's Hail and Farewell , Edmund Gosse's Father and Son , * Henry James's Autobiography, and other works published during what is perhaps the most fruitful period for autobiographical writing in English. The first two chapters form an extended introduction. In Chapter I a definition of autobiography is proposed, and the history of this literary form is traced, with particular reference to the importance of the Romantic Movement, which provided the first concentrated period of auto biographical writing. Chapter II takes up the history of autobiography in relation to the Victorian age, and argues that the literary and social ethos of that period made for ambivalent attitudes towards autobiography: that the impulse to objectivity, or impersonality, or reticence, or privacy often came into conflict with an equally genuine interest in autobiography. It is argued that certain changes which occurred in this ethos as the nineteenth century progressed made the literary atmos- sphere more wholly congenial towards autobiography. The next three chapters each take up a particular artistic and critical problem involved in the writing and study of autobiography, and examine it through the study of certain works of the period. Thus Chapter III discusses the question of autobiography and form, and through examination principally of Harriet Martineau's Autobiography , Trollope's An Autobiography and Ruskin's Praeterita , explores the didactic dimension of autobiography, and its formal links with the essay, the travel hook, the hook of social criticism and the tract--links which were particularly strong early in the period. Praeterita is proposed as a distinguished example of an autobiography which is both generalized and didactic as well as profoundly personal. Chapter IV concentrates on the question of style in autobiography, through a study of the self-portraits of J.S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, Carlyle and Newman. In particular the chapter examines the autobiographer's need to use the correct "tone," which will suggest the quality of his experience and encourage the desired response to his life-story. Chapter V explores the ways in which life-stories are narrated and suggests that the novel becomes an important influence upon some later autobiographies of the period--particularly Edmund Gosse's Father and Son and George Moore's Hail and Farewell . Certain misgivings are expressed about the results of George Moore's determination to have Hail and Farewell resemble a novel whilst remaining genuinely autobiographical --misgivings which relate to the reader's sense that a necessary convention has been violated. Chapter VI is the conclusion, in which the final emphases and su mma ries are made concerning the development of autobiography in Britain from 1864 to 1914. These concluding emphases are made from the vantage- point of Henry James's Autobiography , the last great self-portrait of the period. Particular attention is paid to the important role played in the total effect of this work by James's conception of the narrator.