Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words

This is a "biography of the imagination," an inner narrative of Sylvia Plath's life and work. Combining psychoanalytical, feminist, and intertextual methods, Steven Gould Axelrod traces what Roland Barthes has called "the body's journey through language." After an introductory look at the roles played by language and silence in Plath's verbal universe, Axelrod explores the ways in which the poet's father—and father figures, including male literary precursors—interfered with her imagination ...