Features of autofiction and its reading

The recent history of "autofiction" in literary criticism serves in this paper as a starting point to review the various definitions that scholars have proposed till the present date and to try to determine the distinctive traits of the literary practices that can be included within this concept. The difficulties that arise when one tries to set rigid boundaries between "fiction", "non-fiction" and "autofiction" are examined, some narrative and poetry texts that could be considered "avant la lettre autofictions" are analyzed and a characterization of the phenomenon from a reception perspective is proposed. This essay hypothesizes that the defning feature of "autofiction" is the presence of an implied reader in the text that is capable of sharing the author's intimacy.