The awkward age of autobiography: Modernization, temporality, and American self-representation, 1865--1915

In the late nineteenth century the literary genre of autobiography went through a dramatic transformation. Autobiographers increasingly wrote truncated accounts of their past, published multiple autobiographical works, used third-person narration, and dropped linear narration in favor of circuitous, repetitive, or thematic ordering. Many of these writers resisted the progress narrative that once provided authors like Benjamin Franklin with a model for representing the life narrative. This dissertation links these formal shifts with the transatlantic critique of modern progress with reference to some of the era's most ambivalent observers of a rapidly shifting social terrain: Lucy Larcom, Henry Adams, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, and William Dean Howells. I argue that the formal experimentation with temporality in autobiography during this period results from ambivalence to modernization experienced during an historically earlier time. Many of these autobiographers rejected the idea of planned obsolescence and the language of superannuation and in so doing they formally registered the historiographical complexities raised by questioning modern conceptions of time. While remembering these past moments, the authors I discuss resisted the closed world invited by nostalgic reactions. At the same time, their backward gaze was complicated by the contemporary modern mood to leave the past behind as well as a lingering concern over the unfinished work of the past. Yet these authors did not disavow history and subjectivity; rather, they critiqued what they viewed as the degradation of these forms. Armed with a host of self-consciously awkward affects these authors persisted in creating literary representations of lived experience.