Narrating the Self: 200 Years of Autobiographical Texts

Abstract

Scholarly consensus as to defining the genre of autobiography has largely coalesced around the determination that there can be no fixed and overarching definition of genre. In this study, we turn to the autobiographical texts themselves in order to discern large-scale conventions and commonplaces of writing about the self. Employing the machine learning technique of statistical topic modeling, this study analyzes over 83,000 pages of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century autobiographical texts written in English. In doing so, it reveals common autobiographical conventions, subjects, and discourses, while shedding light on current scholarly understandings of autobiography.