This article discusses ideologically-slanted reactions to the study of British Victorian autobiography, a “male-dominated” literary genre, as an example of the “social agendas” currently operative in the study of the humanities. It focuses on the publication and reception of the book The Genre of Autobiography in Victorian Literature (1994a). Literary autobiography for the Victorians was a referential, nonfiction genre, which, with conventional pressures applied through historicity and verifiability, required the conflation of mental or spiritual (inner) development and the (outer) development of career and reputation based on publications (along with other public works). The field of men's studies opens up a space within which male writers like the Victorian autobiographers can be studied unapologetically from a variety of theoretical perspectives.
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