Confessional poetry implies sharing the personal and the private, and it made Sylvia Plath famous. But what if confession means something else? This book analyses the emergence of Plath’s version of ‘confessional’ poetry during late ’50s America in the light of anti-American show trials, the popularization of therapy and the long history of the confessional as a genre. Plath repeatedly affirmed that writing itself was her religion, and the book focuses on the spiritual dimension of her work: because of this, the comparison with Augustine's Confessions is particularly significant.

This book argues that Augustine wrote the Confessions to articulate a new kind of relationship with God, social power and the self, not to express the self that already exists. Despite Plath’s opposition to the Saint’s conception of love, her writing questions the self-mastery of the desiring subject just as God’s grace did in the Confessions, intertwining it with other voices and times. By returning to the deep origins of confession as ‘heterobiography’, the book argues that confessional writing is a development of modernism, an experimental space where the poet tests a self still in formation, and the speaking “I” emerges only if read out loud. Making poems that resist the social and psychological powers demanding the exposure of a pre-existent core, Plath reshapes a literary genre and jeopardizes the self-evidence of values like privacy, freedom and self-determination, making the confessional form an alternative to the idea of liberal democratic society coined within American Cold War rhetoric. Opposing ‘confession’ to the American Ego-Psychology of the late 50s, the book argues for the similarities between confessional’s reversal of ‘intimacy’ and Lacan’s, who was an eager reader of Augustine.

Doriana Licusati is an independent scholar. Her PhD focussed on the long history of the genre of confessional writing and was undertaken at Queen Mary University of London. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Sapienza University of Rome, where her project explored confession and vulnerability, looking at the continuing presence of Augustine in contemporary literature and psychoanalysis. She is currently studying psychology.