Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays

by Gill; Jo

• ISBN13: 9780415339698
• ISBN10: 0415339693
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-11-14
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Modern Confessional Writingoffers 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 Writingdevelops 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 isliberated 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.

Table of Contents

Contributors	vii
Acknowledgements	ix
Introduction	1	(165)
JO GILL
1 Dangerous confessions: the problem of reading Sylvia Plath biographically	11	(22)
TRACY BRAIN
2 Confessing the body: Plath, Sexton, Berryman, Lowell, Ginsberg and the gendered poetics of the 'real'	33	(17)
ELIZABETH GREGORY
3 'To feel with a human stranger': Adrienne Rich's post-Holocaust confession and the limits of identification	50	(17)
ANN KENISTON
4 'Your story. My story': confessional writing and the case of Birthday Letters	67	(17)
JO GILL
5 Bridget Jones's Diary: confessing post-feminism	84	(16)
LEAH GUENTHER
6 'The memoir as self-destruction': A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius	100	(15)
BRAN NICOL
7 Truth, confession and the post-apartheid black consciousness in Njabulo Ndebele's The Cry of Winnie Mandela	115	(22)
YIANNA LIATSOS
8 Personal performance: the resistant confessions of Bobby Baker	137	(17)
DEIRDRE HEDDON
9 Death sentences: confessions of living with dying in narratives of terminal illness	154	(12)
RUTH ROBBINS
10 Cultures of confession/cultures of testimony: turning the subject inside out	166	(14)
SUSANNAH RADSTONE
11 How we confess now: reading the Abu Ghraib archive	180	(13)
LEIGH GILMORE
Index	193