utobiography, what autobiography is in general, and also reviews the research conducted on the genre of autobiography by different scholars. The second chapter begins by laying out the theoretical dimensions of the linguistic and extra-linguistic features of autobiographical genre. In this chapter we have analyzed extracts from the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin from the point of view of their linguistic and extra-linguistic features.
CHAPTER 1: THE GENRE OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
autobiography is a work about the life of a person, written by that person. Derived from three Greek words meaning self , life , and write , autobiography is a style of writing that has been around nearly as long as history has been recorded. The word autobiography was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the English periodical the Monthly Review, when he suggested the word as a hybrid but condemned it as pedantic < span align = "justify">; but its next recorded use was in its present sense by Robert Southey in 1809. Yet autobiography was not classified as a genre within itself until the late eighteenth century. In his book, Inside Out, E. Stuart Bates offers a functional definition of autobiography as a narrative of the past of a person by the person concerned (Bates 4). That definition, however, is too broad for some literary critics. Many wish to define the genre more narrowly. Linda Anderson cites that definition of autobiography as retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his personality (Anderson 1). She also thinks that the work must implicitly state itself to be an autobiography to be included within the genre (Anderson 1). Other scholars, Bates, for example, do not think that there are any limitations or minimums on how much of a life must be revealed for it to be classified as autobiography. Many factual accounts, though not intended to be an autobiography as such, can be categorized as such because they contain a self-revealed personality, after thorough reconsideration (Bates 4). Cataloging autobiographies are further complicated because there are some that are translations and some that are edited. Despite disagreements concerning how inclusive the category of autobiography should be, there are characteristics that are common to the majority of autobiographical works. These features are the grammatical perspective of the work, the identity of the self, a...
