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With chapters written by more than 25 leading and emerging international scholars,
The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath provides the most comprehensive collection of contemporary scholarship on Plath's work.
Including new scholarly perspectives from feminist and gender studies, critical race studies, medical humanities and disability studies, this collection explores:
· Plath's literary contexts - from the Classics and the long poem to W.B Yeats, Edith Sitwell, Ruth Sillitoe, Carol Ann Duffy, and Ted Hughes
· New insights from Plath's previously unpublished letters and writings
· Plath's broadcasting work for the BBC
Providing new approaches to her life and work, this book is an indispensable volume for scholars of Sylvia Plath.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Note on the Cover
Abbreviations
Introduction: Approaching Sylvia Plath in the Twenty-First Century
Anita Helle
Part I New Cultural and Historical Contexts
1. Plath as Punch Line
Jonathan Ellis
2. “Get bathrobe and slippers and nightgown & and work on femininity”: Sylvia Plath, Self-Identity, and Sleepwear
Rebecca C. Tuite
3. Psychiatric Disability and Asylum Fiction: From The Snake Pit to The Bell Jar
Elizabeth J. Donaldson
4. Sylvia Plath’s Cambridge
Di Beddow
5. Plath in Space: Feeling the Chill of the Void
Tim Hancock
6. Spectral Traces, Places, and Sylvia Plath
Gail Crowther
7. of the Heterotopia: Citizen Critics and Marginalia in Library Copies of Sylvia Plath
Christine Walde
8. “God’s Lioness” and God’s “Negress”: The Feminine and the Figure of the African American in Plath
Jerome Ellison Murphy
9. Centering Whiteness: Sylvia Plath’s Literary Apprenticeship
Maeve O’Brien
10. The Child Reading: Female Stereotypes and Social Authority in Sylvia Plath’s Children’s Stories
Lissi Athanasiou-Krikelis
11. Lucent Figs and Suave Veal Chops: Sylvia Plath and Food
Lynda K. Bundtzen
Part II Affiliations, Influences, and Intertextualities
12. Sylvia Plath’s Greek Tragedy
Holly Ranger
13. “Yeats I like very very much”: Sylvia Plath and W. B. Yeats
Gillian Groszewski
14. The Law of Similarity and the Law of Contact: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Sympathetic Magic
Katherine Robinson
15. “I am a miner”: Long Poems and Literary Succession in Ariel and Crow
Jennifer Ryan-Bryant
16. “Not Mrs. Hughes and Mrs. Sillitoe”: Sylvia Plath and Ruth Fainlight in the 1960s
Heather Clark
17. Beelines: Reading Plath through Edith Sitwell and Carol Ann Duffy
Marsha Bryant
18. Medusa’s Metadata: Aurelia Plath’s Gregg Shorthand Annotations
Catherine Rankovic
19. “I may hate her, but that’s not all”: Mother–Daughter Intimacy in the Plath Archive
Janet Badia
Part III Media and Pedagogy
20. Plath and Media Culture
Nicola Presley
21. “I imagine that a man might not praise it as much”: Reception of “Three Women” and Plath’s BBC-Recorded Poetry
Carrie Smith
22. Sylvia Plath’s “Three Women”: Producing a Poetics of Listening at the BBC
Nerys Williams
23. Sylvia Plath’s “The Jailor” as Radical Feminist Text
Bethany Hicok
24. Archival Pedagogy: Curating Edna O’Brien’s Sylvia Plath Television Play
Amanda Golden
25. Feminist Recovery, Service Learning, and Community Engagement in a Sylvia Plath Studies Undergraduate Seminar
Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick
Part IV Editing the Archives
26. Sylvia Plath in the Round
Karen V. Kukil
27. “They will come asking for our letters”: Editing The Letters of Sylvia Plath
Peter K. Steinberg
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Anita Helle is Professor of English at Oregon State University, USA and founding Director of the School of Writing, Literature, and Film (2011-2015). She is the editor of The Unravelling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath (2007).Amanda Golden is Associate Professor of English at New York Institute of Technology, USA. She is the author of Annotating Modernism (2019) and editor of This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton (2016).Maeve O'Brien a postdoctoral research co-ordinator at University College Dublin, Ireland.
Summary
With chapters written by more than 25 leading and emerging international scholars, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath provides the most comprehensive collection of contemporary scholarship on Plath’s work.
Including new scholarly perspectives from feminist and gender studies, critical race studies, medical humanities and disability studies, this collection explores:
· Plath’s literary contexts – from the Classics and the long poem to W.B Yeats, Edith Sitwell, Ruth Sillitoe, Carol Ann Duffy, and Ted Hughes
· New insights from Plath’s previously unpublished letters and writings
· Plath’s broadcasting work for the BBC
Providing new approaches to her life and work, this book is an indispensable volume for scholars of Sylvia Plath.
Additional text
The editors of this comprehensive collection easily make the case for more scholarly and critical work on Sylvia Plath. They cite her evolving and expanding archive and publications, including a restored edition of Ariel, the edition of Plath’s collected letters, and Emory University’s recent acquisition of the Harriet Rosenstein papers. Not only are their new things to say about Sylvia Plath, whose “global stature,”needs no defense, there are new approaches to the study of her work and life that this volume explores.
