Confessional writing
Encyclopedia
In literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

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

Originally, the term derived from confession
Confession
This article is for the religious practice of confessing one's sins.Confession is the acknowledgment of sin or wrongs...

: the writer is not only autobiographically
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...

 recounting his life, but confessing to his sins. Among the earliest examples is St Augustine
Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo , also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin, St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius . He was a Latin-speaking philosopher and theologian who lived in the Roman Africa Province...

's Confessions
Confessions (St. Augustine)
Confessions is the name of an autobiographical work, consisting of 13 books, by St. Augustine of Hippo, written between AD 397 and AD 398. Modern English translations of it are sometimes published under the title The Confessions of St...

, perhaps the first autobiography of Western Europe. In it, he not only recounted the events of his life, he wrestled with their meaning and significiance, 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
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...

 turned it to a more secular purpose in his Confessions
Confessions (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
Confessions is an autobiographical book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In modern times, it is often published with the title The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in order to distinguish it from St. Augustine of Hippo's Confessions...

.

From this meaning evolved the meaning of writing that reveals more of the writer's heart and 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
Fictional character
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...

 is caught. These stories may be anything from thinly veiled recountings of the writer's life, to completely fictional works.

With the advent of the magazine True Story
True Story (magazine)
True Story was an American magazine published by Dorchester Publishing. It was the first of the confessions magazines genre, having launched in 1919...

in 1919 and the imitations of it, the confessional (or romance) magazine was created, containing such stories. Such confessions magazines were chiefly aimed at an audience of working class women. 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, unembittered by her pain.
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