Autobiographical Writing and British Literature 1783-1834

The word ''autobiography'' is a late eighteenth-century coinage; yet by 1826 it was used as the title for a multi-volume anthology of self-writing, and in 1834 Thomas Carlyle wrote of ''these Autobiographical times of ours''. Over the course of those few decades, readers and writers came to recognize and name a new genre. This book is the first full study of the phenomenon, examining both the co...