Full Description
Confessional literature stretches beyond autobiography and overlaps every literary genre. It is eminently dramatic and always performative, it is a hopeful crying out in response to crisis, and a plea for reconciliation with community. It is an individual's private admission of guilt or a community's open plea for mercy, an auricular-ocular confession, and a pervasive human activity that is both heard and seen. This study introduces two major theoretical perspectives that have been consistently overlooked: the performance nature of confession, and the incorrect classification of confession as only a subset of autobiography. As this book demonstrates, confession is not always autobiographical but is always performative.
Contents
Part 1 Preface Part 2 Acknowledgments Part 3 Chapter One: Liberating a Captive Genre: Past Insights and New Perspectives Part 4 Chapter Two: Penitence, Persuasion and Power: A Performative Model of Confession Part 5 Chapter Three: Confession and Liberty: Cervantes La historia del cautivo Part 6 Chapter Four: Impious and Unbelieving Priests in the Spanish Confessional Tradition Part 7 Chapter Five: Es de Lope: The Drama of Confession and Fuente Ovejuna Part 8 Chapter Six: Confessing Incognito: Zorrilla's Traidor, inconfeso y mártir Part 9 Chapter Seven: Confessional Literature: Redefining a genre Part 10 Notes; Bibliography.
