Male life in literary and ‘naive’ autobiographies

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study based on the use of methods of corpus linguistics compares literary and ‘naive autobiographies’ of men and women. The empirical material of this research is represented by texts of autobiographies of men from provincial Russia, the corpus of ‘naive’ male autobiographies comprises 36 interviews (28,335 word usages). For the comparative analysis 46 female autobiographies have been used (the total corpus contains 48,530 word usages) dwelling in the countryside and provincial towns as well. The other group of materials includes 20 ‘literary autobiographies’ of writers (the corpus of literary male autobiographies contains 27,241 word usages). It was found that the autobiographies of writers, as well as the autobiographies of ‘ordinary males’, are being constructed by the authors within the boundaries of the ‘male culture’ rules regardless of abilities and literary experiences.