Victorian Autobiography

In a Melting Pot of Autobiography: Pickthall’s With the Turk in Wartime and the Cause of Islam

“…He further declares his goal to learn the Turkish language and to get to know the Turks as well. On the other hand, Pickthall partakes of the Victorians' objective strain, but not their oedipal crisis that Nord (2014) discloses, in her essay "Victorian Autobiography: Sons and Fathers," as characteristic of the autobiography of that age. Pickthall does not challenge the father figure he lost early in life as a child of five but challenges the British government's Balkan policy and its anti-Muslim orientation.…”

“…The Victorian type "tends to be more impersonal and less anguished and introverted than the Romantic self-chronicles" (DiBattista & Wittman, 2014, p. 10). It strives for objectivity without necessarily fully achieving it; for some Victorian writers unconsciously expound personal life through an oedipal crisis (like Darwin and Mill), while others manage to turn autobiographic content into philosophical and meditative contemplations (like Newman) (Nord, 2014). The modern form of the genre continues in the contemplative mode, abandons "the linear convention of narrative" (DiBattista & Wittman, 2014, p. 17), and authors become selective and subtle in expounding personal experience like Nabokov, who "does not tell the reader precisely what he has in mind, but a few elements [ultimately] present themselves quite clearly" to his readers (De La Durantaye, 2014, p. 176).…”