La autobiografía juvenil de José Cadalso

Abstract

The brief autobiography written by José Cadalso in 1773, unknown until its discovery in 1967, has driven to some interpretations in many different and contradictory ways. This work has a great importance in order to describe Cadalso's personality, and it presuposes also an unique testimonial on the Spanish autobiographical literature of the eigteenth century. This paper aims at making a critical revision of the different readings included in that little work and try to study not only its style and structure, but also its selection of the biographical information found in the memoirs and its consecuent development. The conclusion is that Cadalso's work is an early autobiography in a modern sense, introspective and full OS moral and psychological preoccupations. This autobiography takes a distance from the rest of Spanish modern autobiographies in the fact of being a work written in Cadalso's young years, in the middle of incertitudes to the future and not with the intention of making an overview of his past life.