1st Edition

Modern Confessional Writing New Critical Essays

Edited By Jo Gill Copyright 2006
208 Pages
by Routledge

208 Pages
by Routledge

208 Pages
by Routledge

A comprehensive and scholarly account of this popular and influential genre, the essays in this collection explore confessional literature from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, and include 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 critique conventional readings of... Read more

Introduction.  Dangerous Confessions: The Problem of Reading Sylvia Plath Biographically.  Confessing the Body: Plath, Sexton, Berryman, Lowell, Ginsberg and the Gendered Poetics of the ‘Real’.  ‘To Feel with a Human Stranger’: Adrienne Rich's Post-Holocaust Confession and the Limits of Identification.  ‘Your Story. My Story’: Confessional Writing and the Case of Birthday Letters.  Bridget Jones’s Diary: Confessing Post-Feminism.  ‘The Memoir as Self-Destruction’: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.  Truth, Confession, and the Post-Apartheid Black Consciousness in Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela.  Personal Performances: The Resistant Confessions of Bobby Baker.  Death Sentences: Confessions of Living with Dying in Narratives of Terminal Illness.  Cultures of Confession/Cultures of Testimony: Turning the Subject Inside Out.  How We Confess Now: Reading the Abu Ghraib Archive.  Index

Biography

Jo Gill