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A LOVER OF LIGHT AMONG LUMINARIES : Dilip Kumar Roy nature. Memoirs and reminiscences emphasize what is remembered rather than who is remembering. In the 15th century Philippie de Conmynes, in his memoirs, speaks more of the life of Louis XI, master of statecraft, than himself. He is present only as a witness to the actions of Louis. In the 20th century Sir Orbert Sitwell's volumes of recollections are noteworthy. Formal autobiography
"... offers a special kind of biographical truth: a life, reshaped by recollection, with all of recollection's conscious and
unconscious omissions and distortions."
One can find the examples of formal autobiography in the literature of the Antiquity and the Middle Ages also. In the 2nd century B. C. the Chinese classical historian Ssu-ma gives a brief account of himself in Shihchi, "Historical Records." Julius Caesar's Commentaries speak little about himself and more about the conquest of Gaul. The Confessions of St. Augustine of the 5th century A.D. is a remarkable early example of this genre.
In Europe, autobiography begins with the Renaissance. Margery Kempe, an Italian mystic, dictated an account of her life during this period. Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who became Pope Pius II in 1458, wrote his autobiography Commentarii. In England, the 17th century is rich in autobiography. The autobiographies written by Richard Baxter and Bunyan are examples of religious life-accounts. In the 19th century, Colly Gibber's Apology for the Life of Colly Gibber, Comedian attracted the readers and critics as well. During the later 18th century three major autobiographies were written by the distinguished authors, viz. Benjamin Franklin, Edward Gibbon and Rousseau. Rousseau's Confessions inspired Wordsworth to write the Prelude and Byron to write Childe Harold.
Specialized Forms of Autobiography are classified under four heads: thematic, religious, intellectual and fictionalized autobiographies. Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (1924) and Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) can be called thematic autobiographies. St. Augustine's Confessions and Peter Abelard's Historia Calamitatum in the Middle Ages and a few chapters of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus are- instances of religious type of autobiography. John S. Mill's Autobiography and Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907) are intellectual autobiographies. Fictionalized autobiographies are thinly disguised as novels. Such works as Samuel Butler's Way of All Flesh (1903), James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and George Santayana's Last Puritan (1935) are some of the notable examples of this kind of autobiography.
The forms of biography and autobiography were alien to the Indians before the British arrived. Earlier, we, Indians were not aware of the importance of
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