An autobiography is a self-written account of one's life. The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the English periodical The Monthly Review, when he suggested the word as a hybrid, but condemned it as "pedantic". However, its next recorded use was in its present sense, by Robert Southey in 1809. Despite only being named early in the nineteenth century, first-person autobiographical writing originates in antiquity. Roy Pascal differentiates autobiography from the periodic self-reflective mode of journal or diary writing by noting that "[autobiography] is a review of a life from a particular moment in time, while the diary, however reflective it may be, moves through a series of moments in time". Autobiography thus takes stock of the autobiographer's life from the moment of composition. While biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints, autobiography may be based entirely on the writer's memory. The memoir form is closely associated with autobiography but it tends, as Pascal claims, to focus less on the self and more on others during the autobiographer's review of their own life.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy is a series of three novels by American writers Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, first published in 1975. The trilogy is a satirical, postmodern, science fiction–influenced adventure story; a drug-, sex-, and magic-laden trek through a number of conspiracy theories, both historical and imaginary, related to the authors' version of the Illuminati. The narrative often switches between third- and first-person perspectives in a nonlinear narrative. It is thematically dense, covering topics like counterculture, numerology, and Discordianism.
If on a winter's night a traveler is a 1979 novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. The postmodernist narrative, in the form of a frame story, is about the reader trying to read a book called If on a winter's night a traveler. Each chapter is divided into two sections. The first section of each chapter is in second person, and describes the process the reader goes through to attempt to read the next chapter of the book he or she is reading. The second half is the first part of a new book that the reader ("you") finds. The second half is always about something different from the previous ones. The book was published in an English translation by William Weaver in 1981.
A first-person narrative is a mode of storytelling in which a storyteller recounts events from their own point of view using the first person such as "I", "us", "our" and "ourselves". It may be narrated by a first-person protagonist, first-person re-teller, first-person witness, or first-person peripheral. A classic example of a first-person protagonist narrator is Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), in which the title character is also the narrator telling her own story, "I could not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me".
A story within a story, also referred to as an embedded narrative, is a literary device in which a character within a story becomes the narrator of a second story. Multiple layers of stories within stories are sometimes called nested stories. A play may have a brief play within it, such as Shakespeare's play Hamlet; a film may show the characters watching a short film; or a novel may contain a short story within the novel. A story within a story can be used in all types of narration: novels, short stories, plays, television programs, films, poems, songs, video games, and philosophical essays.
A look-alike, double, or doppelgänger is a person who bears a strong physical resemblance to another person, excluding cases like twins and other instances of family resemblance.
A narrative, story or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional or fictional. Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, still or moving images, or any combination of these. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, which is derived from the adjective gnarus. Along with argumentation, description, and exposition, narration, broadly defined, is one of four rhetorical modes of discourse. More narrowly defined, it is the fiction-writing mode in which the narrator communicates directly to the reader. The school of literary criticism known as Russian formalism has applied methods used to analyse narrative fiction to non-fictional texts such as political speeches.
The National Party, also known as the Nationalist Party, was a political party in South Africa founded in 1914 and disbanded in 1997. The party was an Afrikaner ethnic nationalist party that promoted Afrikaner interests in South Africa. However, in 1990 it became a South African civic nationalist party seeking to represent all South Africans. It first became the governing party of the country in 1924. It was an opposition party during World War II but it returned to power and was again in the government from 4 June 1948 until 9 May 1994.
The Feast of the Goat is a novel by the Peruvian Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. The book is set in the Dominican Republic and portrays the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and its aftermath, from two distinct standpoints a generation apart: during and immediately after the assassination itself, in May 1961; and thirty-five years later, in 1996. Throughout, there is also extensive reflection on the heyday of the dictatorship, in the 1950s, and its significance for the island and its inhabitants.
Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story, to deliver information to the audience, particularly about the plot. Narration is a required element of all written stories, with the function of conveying the story in its entirety. However, narration is merely optional in most other storytelling formats, such as films, plays, television shows, and video games, in which the story can be conveyed through other means, like dialogue between characters or visual action.
The Rules of Attraction is a satirical black comedy novel by Bret Easton Ellis published in 1987. The novel follows a handful of rowdy and often sexually promiscuous, spoiled bohemian students at a liberal arts college in 1980s New Hampshire, including three who develop a love triangle. The novel is written in first person narrative, and the story is told from the points of view of various characters.
Libra is a 1988 novel by Don DeLillo that describes the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and his participation in a fictional CIA conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. The novel blends historical fact with fictional supposition.
Dramatic structure is the structure of a dramatic work such as a book, play, or film. There are different kinds of dramatic structures worldwide which have been hypothesized by critics, writers and scholars alike over time. This article covers the range of dramatic structures from around the world. How the acts are structured, what the center of the story is supposed to be about widely varies by region and time period.
Winter Kills is a black comedy novel by Richard Condon, exploring the assassination of a U.S. President. It was published in 1974. The novel parallels the death of John F. Kennedy and the conspiracy theories about it.
Text types in literature form the basic styles of writing. Factual texts merely seek to inform, whereas literary texts seek to entertain or otherwise engage the reader by using creative language and imagery. There are many aspects to literary writing, and many ways to analyse it, but four basic categories are descriptive, narrative, expository, and argumentative.
The Book of the Short Sun (1999–2001) is a series of three science fantasy novels or one three-volume novel by the American author Gene Wolfe. It continues The Book of the Long Sun (1993–1996): they share a narrator and Short Sun recounts a search for Silk, the Long Sun hero. The two works are set in the same universe as The Book of the New Sun series that Wolfe inaugurated in 1980 and the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) catalogs all three as sub-series of the "Solar Cycle", along with some other writings.
The Covenant is a historical novel by American author James A. Michener, published in 1980.
Vortex is a 1991 war novel by Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin. Set during the final years of apartheid in South Africa, Vortex follows the assassination of a reformist National Party president and his cabinet by the African National Congress, as well as a subsequent seizure of power by far-right Afrikaners. The plot unfolds through a series of intertwining accounts narrated through several characters. It was a commercial success, receiving generally positive reviews.
The John F. Kennedy assassination and the subsequent conspiracy theories surrounding it have been discussed, referenced, or recreated in popular culture numerous times.
Arthur Kemp is a Rhodesian-born writer and the owner of Ostara Publications who was from 2009 to 2011 the foreign affairs spokesperson for the British National Party before resigning from that party. He was born in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and worked as a journalist in South Africa before moving to the United Kingdom in 1996.
