Fictional autobiographies

Works that present themselves as autobiographies but whose narrators and events are fictional. For fiction that is based on events in the author's life, but employs fictional characters intermixed with fictional events, see [Autobiographical fiction.]

found: Wheeler, K. Literary terms and definitions, via WWW, Apr. 17, 2013(Memoir-novel: A novel purporting to be a factual or autobiographical account but which is completely or partially imaginary. The authorial voice or speaker is typically a made-up character who never actually lived. This creation is not so much a hoax as a literary convention or an artistic device. An early example would be Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. Later eighteenth-century examples include Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield and Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling. While this convention became less popular in the nineteenth-century, some examples have appeared in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature--including Umberto Eco's Baudolino)

found: Encyclopedia of the novel, 1998:v. 1 (under Autobiographical novel: The distinction between autobiographical fiction and fictional autobiography is more straightforward. An autobiographical novel follows novelistic conventions but contains some material taken from the author's life. A fictional autobiography, such as Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722), is entirely fictional but observes the conventions of autobiography in its account of the life of the narrator)

found: Baldick, C. Oxford dictionary of literary terms, 2008(Autofiction: A kind of novel or story that is written as a first-person narrative and that commonly presents itself fictionally as an autobiography of the narrator or as an episode within such an autobiographical account. Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is one among many classic novels that fall into this category. The term emerged from modern French narrative theory, but has sometimes been borrowed in English.)

Works that present themselves as autobiographies but whose narrators and events are fictional. For fiction that is based on events in the author's life, but employs fictional characters intermixed with fictional events, see [Autobiographical fiction.]