"Modern Confessional Writing" offers 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...

The controversies that surround Sylvia Plath's life and work imply that her poems are more read and studied now than ever before. This Companion provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the place in twentieth-century culture of Sylvia Plath's poetry, prose, letters and journals. The newly commissioned essays by leading international scholars represent a spectrum of critical perspectives. They pay particular attention to key debates and to well-known texts such as The Bell Jar, while offering original and thought-provoking readings to new as well as more seasoned Plath readers.

The controversies that surround Sylvia Plath's life and work imply that her poems are more read and studied now than ever before. This Companion provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the place in twentieth-century culture of Sylvia Plath's poetry, prose, letters and journals. The newly commissioned essays by leading international scholars represent a spectrum of critical perspectives. They pay particular attention to key debates and to well-known texts such as The Bell Jar, while offering original and thought-provoking readings to new as well as more seasoned Plath readers.

Given the amount of scholarship on twentieth-century poetry, there has been remarkably little published about Anne Sexton, even though her work is considered to be as important as that of such contemporaries as Sylvia Plath and W. H. Auden. By offering new and provocative readings of her entire oeuvre, Jo Gill provides a long overdue critical appreciation of Anne Sexton and presents a radical rethinking of the confessional mode of poetry and a recuperation of Sexton's place in it.Gill makes substantial use of Sexton's archive of unpublished diaries, drafts, correspondence, lectures,...

Sylvia Plath is widely recognized as one of the leading figures in twentieth-century Anglo-American literature and culture. Her work has constantly remained in print in the UK and US (and in numerous translated editions) since the appearance of her first collection in 1960. Plath's own writing has been supplemented over the decades by a wealth of critical and biographical material. The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath provides an authoritative and comprehensive guide to the poetry, prose and autobiographical writings of Sylvia Plath. It offers a critical overview of key readings,...

Sylvia Plath is widely recognized as one of the leading figures in twentieth-century Anglo-American literature and culture. Her work has constantly remained in print in the UK and US (and in numerous translated editions) since the appearance of her first collection in 1960. Plath's own writing has been supplemented over the decades by a wealth of critical and biographical material. The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath provides an authoritative and comprehensive guide to the poetry, prose and autobiographical writings of Sylvia Plath. It offers a critical overview of key readings,...

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...

Literature as History presents a selection of specially commissioned essays by a range of key contemporary thinkers on the interdisciplinary study of literature and history. The unifying theme is the interrelationship between literary / cultural production and its historical moment. The essays in the collection are astute and exciting in terms of their engagement with ever-changing developments in critical and theoretical practice while retaining an invaluable focus on familiar and engaging texts and authors. The contributors offer a reappraisal of the nature of literary studies today,...

The first scholarly study of the rich body of poetry that emerged from the post-war American suburbs, Gill evaluates the work of forty poets, including Anne Sexton, Langston Hughes, and John Updike. Combining textual analysis and archival research, this book offers a new perspective on the field of twentieth-century American literature.