Product Description

This work is concerned with the `authority' of autobiography. Couser considers recent critiques of the notion of autobiography as issuing from, determined by, referring to a pre-existing self. He examines the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin, P. T. Barnum, and Mark Twain and appraises the authority of autobiography in the rather different circumstances of the minority writer: in slave narratives, the Civil War diaries of Mary Chesnut, and contemporary works by Richard Rodriguez and Maxine Hong Kingston. The work treats autobiographical writing as a struggle for literary control over the life of the author, against the constraints of genre, language, and society.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5338309 in Books
• Published on: 1989-12-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.12 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 296 pages

Review

"Thoughtful, probing, alert, intelligent....No student of American autobiography, or of autobiography from wherever, can afford to be unaware of its argument at large or of its readings in detail of specific texts."--American Literary History
"Another landmark study of autobiography by Couser....Highly recommended for undergraduate and graduate students, and faculty."--Choice
"A thoroughly rewarding book, both for the variety and richness of texts it discusses and for the glimpse it affords into the world of post-poststructuralist autobiography studies."--Journal of English and Germanic Philology
"Vital, original perspectives on the study of autobiography."--American Literature
"A substantial contribution to autobiography studies and in many respects strikingly original. Couser brings a wide range of both historical and critical scholarship to bear upon the autobiographies he studies, but never subordinates his own purposes to the orthodoxies of a particular critical me