Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays

Voorkant
Jo Gill
Routledge, 29 mrt 2006 - 208 pagina's

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 confessionalism. Orthodox, humanist notions of the literary act of confession and its assumed relationship to truth, authority and subjectivity are challenged, and in their place a range of new critical perspectives and practices are adopted.

Modern Confessional Writing develops and tests new theoretically-informed views 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 that it provides a kind of easy authorial release and readerly catharsis, and is instead read as a discursive, self-reflexive, sophisticated and demanding genre.

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Inhoudsopgave

Introduction
1
The Problem of Reading Sylvia Plath Biographically
11
Plath Sexton Berryman Lowell Ginsberg and the Gendered Poetics of the Real
33
Adrienne Richs PostHolocaust Confession and the Limits of Identification
50
Confessional Writing and the Case of Birthday Letters
67
Confessing PostFeminism
84
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
100
7 Truth Confession and the PostApartheid Black Consciousness in Njabulo Ndebeles The Cry of Winnie Mandela
115
The Resistant Confessions of Bobby Baker
137
Confessions of Living with Dying in Narratives of Terminal Illness
154
Turning the Subject Inside Out
166
Reading the Abu Ghraib Archive
180
Index
193
Copyright

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