Abstract: Autobiography is a truth-based genre. Although autobiography can not be totally true, it still endeavors to pursue the relative truth, which depends on whether the autobiographer is willing to tell the truth, thus involving the author’s different concepts of autobiography. By analyzing autobiographies by three Chinese writers Wang Meng, Xia Yan and Zhou Zuoren, this paper explores three disparate concepts of autobiography: truth priority,  privacy priority, and the autobiographers’ rights priority.

Keywords: the concept of autobiography, truth, taboo

Han Bin is Associate Professor at Weifang University and earned her Ph.D. in Modern Chinese Literature at Shandong Normal University, China. Her research focuses on life-writing research. Her publications include Modern Chinese Literary Biography: A Survey (2015) and The Chinese Writers from Shandong Province: A Short Study (2017). E-mail: shshhanbin@163.com.