| LC control no. | gf2014026231 |
|---|---|
| Thesaurus/term list | lcgft |
| Genre/Form term | Autobiographical fiction |
| Variant(s) | Autobiographic fiction Autofiction Semi-autobiographical fiction Semiautobiographical fiction |
| See also | Biographical fiction |
| Scope note | Fiction that is based on events in the author's life but employs fictional characters intermixed with fictional events. For works that present themselves as autobiographies but whose narrators and events are fictional see Fictional autobiographies. |
| Subject example tracing | Note under Fictional autobiographies |
| Found in | Wheeler, K. Literary terms and definitions, via WWW, April 17, 2013 (Autobiographical novel: In contrast with the pure autobiography, an autobiographical novel is a semi-fictional narrative based in part on the author's life experience, but these experiences are often transposed onto a fictional character or intermixed with fictional events. Examples include Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.) Baldick, C. Oxford dictionary of literary terms, c2008 (autobiographical novel (often qualified as "semi-autobiographical" refers to a kind of novel, of a "Bildungsroman", in which the events, settings, and characters are based upon the author's own life.) GSAFD, 2000 (Autobiographical fiction: Use for works in which the events in the writer's life slightly disguised are presented as fiction. Samuel Butler's The way of all flesh is an example of autobiographical fiction. UF Fiction, Autobiographical) Encyclopedia of the novel, 1998: v.1 (Autobiographical novel: it is impossible to draw a clear line between autobiographical and nonautobiographical fiction. How much of the author's life should be present in a novel to qualify it as autobiographical? This essay will take a highly pragmatic approach to the term, applying it to novels that exhibit a significant and generally uncontested autobiographical presence.The distinction between autobiographical fiction and fictional autobiography is more straightforward. An autobiographical novel follows novelistic conventions but contains some material taken from the author's life. A fictional autobiography, such as Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722), is entirely fictional but observes the conventions of autobiography in its account of the life of the narrator) Encyclopedia of life-writing, 2001 (The I-novel: "I-novel" is an inexact translation from the Japanese of shishōsetsu (alternately read watakushi shōsetsu). Shishōsetsu, which can be translated more accurately as self-writing, denotes prose fiction of variable length believed to reflect authentically the private life of the author) Routledge encyclopedia of narrative theory, 2005 (Autofiction: Autofiction is a homodiegetic narrative that declares itself to be fiction - by being called 'novel' on the front page, for example - but actually relates events of the author's own life and identifies the author in the text by his or her real name) |
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