Modern Confessional Writing offers the first comprehensive and scholarly account of this popular and influential genre. The essays in this collection take as their subject confessional literature from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, including the writing of John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Ted Hughes and Helen Fielding.
Drawing on a wide range of examples the contributors to this volume evaluate - and in most cases critique - conventional readings of confessionalism. Orthodox, humanist notions of the literary confession, and its assumed relationship to truth authority and subjectivity are challenged, in their place a range of critical perspectives and practices are adopted, utilizing the insights of contemporary critical theorists. Modern Confessional Writing develops and tests new, theoretically-informed perspectives on what confessional writing is, how it functions and what it means to both writer and reader. When read from these new perspectives modern confessional writing is liberated from the misconception it provides a kind of easy authorial release and readerly catharsis, and is instead read as a discursive, self-reflexive, sophisticated and demanding genre.