Primarily poets, writers Alfonsina Storni and Alejandra Pizarnik had in common being daughters of immigrants, and both committed suicide. Storni’s poetry during her lifetime was popular and accessible, with topics of women, love, and modernity. Poet, journalist, dramatist, and maestra (schoolteacher), she gained early fame but only partial critical success. She crafted a defiant public image and even staged her suicide after a long struggle with cancer. She protested the stigma of being an unwed mother and other injustices borne by women. In contrast, Pizarnik initially reached a smaller but influential reading public; many young readers identify with her elusive and fractured poetry-theater of interiority. Rebellious and bisexual, she was the daughter of Jews who had escaped the Holocaust but lost their world. Loss, mourning, and sometimes violence, abjection, and terror are recurring topics, as in The Bloody Countess. As with Storni, there is confessionalism, but Pizarnik’s “I” is not a stable subject but a wandering marker, emphasizing the body, sexual desire, and fragmentation. Pizarnik’s struggle with language becomes a battle against the breakdown of the world.

One of the largest branches of Protestantism, Lutherans have been in North America for more than 400 years. Lutheranism was established on this continent initially by immigrants from the historically Lutheran areas in Europe, notably Germany, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe. More recent Lutheran immigrants have come from younger Lutheran churches in Asia and Africa. In the United States, these immigrants formed congregations and denominations mainly based on language and ethnicity, although they were also divided by theological and religious differences. As these immigrant communities acculturated to the use of English and to the American religious culture, they began a long process of denominational consolidation, as well as moving into the mainstream of national life. American Lutherans still dominate a number of regions of the United States, maintain a quality system of educational institutions and social service agencies, and play a leadership role among Lutherans around the world.

Elizabeth Bishop observed the central tensions in mid-century American poetics from a distance, which allowed her the space to resolve them in her own work in idiosyncratic and shifting ways. This chapter thus looks to her correspondence as an archive of an ad hoc poetic theory. There we see Bishop developing unique constellations of, first, the formality of accentual-syllabic verse and the flexibility of free verse and, second, a residual commitment to modernist impersonality and an emerging aesthetics of confessional disclosure. The chapter draws primarily on letters between Bishop and both Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton to advance its argument and offers readings of Bishop’s poems “Song for the Rainy Season” and “Poem” as evidence of their author’s unique engagement with mid-century poetics.

Depictions of violence were ubiquitous in sixteenth-century Europe and drew freely on biblical and classical sources, as well as stories of Christian martyrdom. The new media of print and printmaking dramatically increased the number of such images, while pamphlets and broadsheets ensured their widespread circulation and deployment in the service of propaganda and the reporting of sensational crimes and disasters. The outbreak of polemic and conflict associated with the Reformation also provided new markets for the visualising of violence. The fascination with soldiers and war was driven by developments in arms technology and the desire of princely patrons to emulate the valour of the ancients. Whereas battle scenes in the first half of the century were largely conventional, the outbreak of confessional wars in the second brought images of gruesome violence, wholesale destruction and massacre, in which cities and the countryside were laid waste. While the use of violence for confessional propaganda never disappeared, the cruelty, desolation and terrible miseries endured by populations at the hands of ravaging soldiers during the Dutch Revolt and the Thirty Years War gradually became the object of fierce critique by artists in the early seventeenth century, drawing parallels with Spanish savagery in the Americas.

Chapter 16 considers the development of the doctrine of justification in Lutheran and Reformed Orthodoxy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Justification was understood by both Protestant communities as an essentially forensic notion. However, there were important divergences between the two, particularly in relation to their understanding of the nature of predestination and the role of a covenant between God and humanity. The chapter analyses the convergences and divergences between Lutheran and Reformed Orthodoxy on the question of the objective grounds and subjective appropriation of justification, before exploring the much greater emphasis placed on the covenantal context of justification in several sections of Reformed theology. Finally, the chapter considers the degrees of continuity that can be identified between the original approaches to justification found in the writings of Luther and Calvin and those found in their Orthodox successors.

Jonathan Ellis situates Plath’s work in relation to the American poetry scene of the 1950s and early 1960s. He analyses how a mid-century generation of poets like John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell responded to Modernism through the birth of Confessionalism. Ellis draws on Plath’s letters, journals, poems and stories to analyse her own role in and thinking about this aesthetic turn. He considers the impact of Plath’s contemporaries, Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton, as well as Edith Sitwell, Marianne Moore, May Swenson and Isabella Gardner. Situating Plath’s poetry in relation to the work of these poetic godfathers and godmothers, Ellis looks in particular at questions of gender and nationality.