The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath

by Anita Helle (Editor), Amanda Golden (Editor), Maeve O'Brien (Editor)

Overview

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· New insights from Plath's previously unpublished letters and writings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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350419667
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	12/28/2023
Series:	Bloomsbury Handbooks
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	6.69(w) x 9.61(h) x 0.81(d)

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.

Table 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. <maniacs.> 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

Editorial Reviews

The word indispensable can be used indiscriminately at times, but this collection of excellent essays by excellent scholars is the definition of indispensable, both for Plath scholarship and for twenty-first century poetry criticism. Read it. Read all of it.” —Philip McGowan, Professor of American Literature, Queen's University Belfast, UK

“This substantial compendium of exciting and original scholarship promises to reshape the study of Plath and her work. Helle, Golden, and O'Brien have brought together chapters informed by life writing, pedagogy, disability studies, gender studies, and archive studies, and have positioned Plath among other writers-and her own readers-in ways that thrillingly illuminate her oeuvre. Standout pieces include much-needed interventions on race, upon which those working in Plath studies will hopefully build. Through their judicious and creative selection of essays, the editors of this major contribution offer new thinking about the poet's archive, her readers, her sociohistorical moment, and her cultural significance that have implications for scholars well beyond the single-author field.” —Janine Utell, author of Literary Couples and 20th-Century Life Writing: Narrative and Intimacy

“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.” —Feminist Modernist Studies Journal

From the Publisher