Fictive biography definition autobiography

Autobiography and the fictional autobiography each present an unwieldy and intriguing entanglement of lives. An autobiography does not simply represent its writer's life; a fictional autobiography often conflates the lives of its writer and narrator.

The writer's and the narrator's lives are situated in the autobiography and the fictional autobiography, which in turn are situated in a larger matrix: the culture that contains these texts. Three fictional autobiographies — Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse-novel Aurora Leigh (1856), Charles Dickens's novel Great Expectations (1861), and Graham Swift's novel Waterland (1983) — all test how sharply and accurately the fictional autobiography renders the development of a life and its intersection with culture.

In The Genre of Autobiography in Victorian Literature, Clinton Machann argues that the formal conventions of autobiography and the development of a life are naturally suited to each other and, moreover, inextricably in