Book Review

Intended for a general audience, this trim volume argues that autobiography as a narrative form is based on cultural scripts that offer readers symbolic reflections of their own inner lives. Conway believes that, unlike other genres, autobiography has become a universal medium because it addresses complex problems of personal identity using language nonspecialists can comprehend.

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Despite the familiarity of many of the texts Conway discusses, her concise readings are always insightful. Over all, she finds more constancy than change in the genre's common forms—for example, the quest, the romance, the odyssey. Thus the story of the epic hero in classical antiquity is inscribed in later periods as a Napoleonic hero, a self-made economic man, a working-class rebel, a utopian socialist hero, an imperialist adventurer. Less able to express an active, self-magnifying heroism, women across the generations create romantic narratives framing personal relationships or self-sacrificing quests; even pioneering professional women write autobiographies of "philanthropic romance." Despite the perceptive linkages Conway makes across time, however, the "archetypal life scripts" that she sees as the core of all autobiography—a heroic myth for men and a romantic myth for women—remain too schematic to stand as explanatory frameworks for the vast historical and literary territory covered.

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