Fleishman, Avrom. Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.
"The lessons we have learned about cultural codes, symbolic forms, and cognitive archeology will be found to bear with specal weight on autobiography, making it one of the most sensitive registers of the idea of human existence and the pattern of individual life in a given society" (43).
Misch, Georg. A History of Autobiograhpy in Antiquity, trans. E. W. Dickes, 2 vols. (London, 1950 [1907]), I, 12-13:
"Though essentially representations of individual personalities, autobiographies are bound always to be representative of their period, within a range that will vary with the intensity of the author's participation in contemporary life and the sphere in which they moved....
Thus the characteristic self-revelations provide us with an objective, indeed, a demonstrable image of the structure of individuality, varying from epoch to epoch."
Weintraub, Karl J., "Autobiography and Historical Consciousness," Critical Inquiry, I (1975): 837-38):
"When men, with their eyes fascinated by the attractive power of their models, write their autobiographic accounts, they will have scripts for the basic outlines of their lives. The story of their selves can be fitted into basic literary forms."