Autobiographical Novel: The Development of the Term

Abstract

The article discusses the subject of autobiographical novel and its scientific justification. In the first part the author draws the readers’ attention to the fact that certain basic problems concerning the use of the very notion stem from different ways of understanding the term “autobiographical.” The second part of the article outlines certain important approaches to autobiographical novel, predominantly in the Polish literary studies. In this area the most common are biographical methods and various forms of autobiographical treaty. Every single methodological choice entails a certain loss, since autobiographical novel offers several mutually exclusive interpretations. However, there are numerous questions which are rarely posed nowadays, and which concern receptive and medial dimension of the notion in which an autobiographical novel could exist as an “interpretation figure”. These questions are posed in the final part of the work.