DE LA ENTRADA DE LA VOZ AUTOBIOGRAFÍA EN ESPAÑA Y SU APLICACIÓN AL ÁMBITO DE LA LITERATURA(1854–1898)

Abstract

During the second half of the 19th century in Spain the terms autobiografía (autobiography) and autobiográfico (autobiographical) appear in writing in literary criticism and in monolingual non academic dictionaries. Their appearance in the Peninsula occurred earlier than it is thought. Out of the field of literary criticism, and after analyzing the limited interest in writing autobiographies in Spain, we will see that this learned neologism seems to resist being part of the usual official nomenclature of the so-called literature of the Self. Spanish writers are indeed reluctant to choose the term autobiografía (autobiography) for designating theirtheir own works of literary creation and authors choose to call them memorias (memoirs). With respect to the genre of autobiography, critics adopted different attitudes but the great debate —on which most studies on the genre were based— was already established: truth or fiction. Finally, from 1890 on and well into the 20th century, autobiography will experience an important development in literary creation (during the 1920s) and as in critical studies (in the 1970s).