Confessional writing

In literature, confessional writing is a first-person style that is often presented as an ongoing diary or letters, distinguished by revelations of a person's deeper or darker motivations.

Though the style has since gained global use, the Confessional school of writing emerged in mid-20th century America, by writers and poets such as Adrienne Rich, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton.[1] Major thematic concerns of the movement are reflective of the features of early Postmodernism, including self-performativity and self-reflexivity, personal histories, taboo, and influences of personal and historical trauma.[2] Formal features of the movement also include a prevalent use of religious imagery as connotative of sin and desire, and occasional overlaps with social movements such as Feminism and Postcolonialism.[3]

Originally, the term derived from confession: The writer is not only autobiographically recounting their life, but confessing to their sins. Among the earlier examples is St. Augustine's Confessions, perhaps the first autobiography of Western Europe. In it, he not only recounted the events of his life, he wrestled with their meaning and significance, as in a passage where he tried to fathom why he had stolen pears with friends, not to eat but to throw away.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau turned it to a secular purpose in his Confessions.

From this meaning evolved the meaning of writing that reveals more of the writer's motivations, particularly the darker reactions, and the events that are normally kept secret.

Fictionally, the confessional story is a story written, in the first person, about emotionally fraught and morally charged situations in which a fictional character is caught. These stories may be anything from thinly veiled recounting of the writer's life to completely fictional works.

With the advent of the magazine True Story in 1919 and the imitations of it, the confessional (or romance) magazine was created, containing such stories.[4] Such confessions magazines were chiefly aimed at an audience of working-class women.[5] Their formula has been characterized as "sin-suffer-repent": The heroine violates standards of behavior, suffers as a consequence, learns her lesson and resolves to live in light of it, not embittered by her pain.[6]