Autobiographical writing is a long-established genre, conventionally started by Saint Augustine’s Confessions, and developed through the centuries in various historical and cultural contexts.

Involving fundamental issues such as selfhood, representation, authorship and the division between truth and invention, autobiographies may assume different forms – from diaries and memoirs, to narratives – and may express descriptive, narrative and argumentative modes.

The essays of The Language of Autobiography focus on twentieth-century women’s autobiographical texts, belonging to various social and geographical backgrounds and expressing a wide variety of both communicative objectives and discursive practices. The aim of the essays is to analyse the generic, linguistic, stylistic changes of autobiography as well as the ideological assumptions about the value it has in modern society as a means to represent culturally displaced and powerless people that through autobiographical narratives thus affirm themselves and the culture they represent.