Confessional writing

Confessional writing is a literary style and genre that developed in American writing schools following the Second World War.^[1][2] A prominent mode of confessional writing is confessional poetry, which emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Confessional writing is often historically associated with Postmodernism due to the features which the modes share: including self-performativity and self-reflexivity; discussions of culturally taboo subjects; and the literary influences of personal conflict and historical trauma.^[3] Confessional writing also has historical origins in Catholic confessional practices.^[4] As such, confessional writing is congruent with psychoanalytic literary criticism.^[5] Confessional writing is also a form of life writing, especially through the autobiography form.^[6]

Confessional writing usually involves the disclosure of personal revelations and secrets, often in first-person, non-fiction forms such as diaries and memoirs.^[2] Confessional writing often employs colloquial speech and direct language to invoke an immediacy between reader and author. Confessional writers also utilise this direct language to radically reduce the distance between the speaker-persona of a text and the writer's personal voice.^[7] Confessional writing can also be fictive, such as in the hybrid form of the roman à clef.^[8]

Though originating in American literary circles, by writers and poets such as Adrienne Rich, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, the style has gained global use concurrently with the growth of Postcolonial theory at the end of the 20th century,^[9] especially throughout Eurasia and the Middle East.^[10] Confessional writing has also influenced other mediums, including the visual arts and reality television.^[6]

A highly influential movement, Confessional writing has been critiqued as narcissistic, self-indulgent, as well as a violation of the privacy of the private individuals which confessional writers depict.^[11]