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A biography or autobiography tells the story "of a life", while a memoir often tells the story of a particular career, event, or time, such as touchstone moments and turning points in the author's life. The author of a memoir may be referred to as a memoirist or a memorialist.
An autobiography, [a] sometimes informally called an autobio, is a self-written biography of one's own life. Definition 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".
Biography: a written narrative of a person's life; an autobiography is a self-written biography. Memoir: a biographical account of a particular event or period in a person's life (rather than their whole life) drawn from personal knowledge or special sources (such as the spouse of the subject). Misery literature; Slave narrative. Contemporary ...
Life writing is an expansive genre that primarily deals with the purposeful recording of personal memories, experiences, opinions, and emotions for different ends. While what actually constitutes life writing has been up for debate throughout history, it has often been defined through the lens of the history of the autobiography genre as well as the concept of the self as it arises in writing.
Books that are memoirs. As a literary genre, a memoir forms a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are today almost interchangeable. The author of a memoir may be referred to as a memoirist. Some memoirs may be less structured and less encompassing than formal autobiographical works.
The definition of such works remains vague. The term was first widely used in reference to the non-autobiographical In Cold Blood [citation needed] by Truman Capote but has since become associated with a range of works drawing openly from autobiography. The emphasis is on the creation of a work that is essentially true, often in the context of ...
When studying literature, biography and its relationship to literature is often a subject of literary criticism, and is treated in several different forms. Two scholarly approaches use biography or biographical approaches to the past as a tool for interpreting literature: literary biography and biographical criticism .
In autofiction, an author may decide to recount their life in the third person, to modify significant details and characters, use invented subplots and imagined scenarios with real-life characters in the service of a search for self.