Autobiography: Concepts and Connotations

Abstract

generated at the end of the eighteenth century but still powerfully present in the middle of the twentieth, each individual possesses a unified, unique selfhood
which is also the expression of a universal human nature. For Olney, for instance: ‘the explanation for the special appeal of autobiography . . . is a fascination with the
self and its profound, its endless mysteries’ (qtd. in Anderson 5).