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.