Autobiography: Narrative of Transformation

In Autobiography: Narrative of Transformation, Carolyn A. Barros creates a primer for the study of autobiography, a genre many consider highly problematic. She focuses on autobiography as a "narrative of transformation" - a text that presents the "before" and "after" of an individual's life. This study focuses primarily on autobiographies from the rich Victorian period. Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, as it self-consciously fictionalized the composition of Diogenes Teufelsdrockh's life narrative, provides a striking analogue and paradigm for introducing her study and methodological approach. Barros's chapters on John Henry Cardinal Newman, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, and Margaret Oliphant detail four very different types of autobiographical transformation - religious, philosophical, scientific, and literary - and establish benchmarks for considering autobiographies from antiquity to the present.