From Fact to Fiction: The Question of Genre in Autobiography and Early First-Person Novels

[...]structures "are not the product of any one class or monolithic power group"; they represent "multiple conflictual levels of the social formation that are "relatively autonomous"—not simply a reflection of the economic level, although for Althusser that is "determinative in the last instance" ("Politics," 163). [...]eighteenth-century autobiographers experiment with categories, discourses, and ideologies, and can resist what they seem to espouse: they "at once form the private self necessary for an emergent market economy and produce a space for interrogating received assumptions about identity" (165). [...]the strong view accepts poststructuralist thought uncritically, assuming a teleology of the deconstructed self--"multiple, collective and provisional"--free from delusive stability and continuity. [...]she shows that ideology discouraged female spiritual autobiographers, but could not erase formal possibilities. [...]while we should build on the progress made toward theories of how genres work, we must be cautious in our efforts to generalize, and listen carefully to what specific examples tell us.