Sylvia Plath in Context brings together an exciting combination of established and emerging thinkers from a range of disciplines. The book reveals Plath's responses to the writers she reads, her interventions in the literary techniques and forms she encounters, and the wide range of cultural, personal, artistic, political, historical and geographical influences that shaped her work. Many of these essays confront the specific challenges for reading Sylvia Plath today. Others evaluate her legacy to the writers who followed her. Reaching well beyond any simple equation in which biographical cause results in literary effect, all of them argue for a body of work that emerges from Plath's deep involvement in the world she inhabits. Situating Plath's writing within a wide frame of references that reach beyond any single notion of self, this book will be a vital resource for students, scholars, instructors and researchers of Sylvia Plath.
Author(s): Tracy Brain
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2019
Cover
Half-title page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Chronology
List of Abbreviations and Textual Note
Key Archives
Introduction
Part I Literary Contexts
1 Plath and the American Poetry Scene
2 The Dominant Trends in British Poetry of the 1950s and Early 1960s
3 Plath and the Classics
4 Plath and the Radio Drama
5 ‘Sincerely Yours’: Plath and The New Yorker
Part II Literary Technique and Influence
6 Plath in the Context of Stevie Smith
7 Plath’s Whimsy
8 Sylvia Plath and You
9 Plath and the Lyric
10 Plath and the Pastoral
Part III Cultural Contexts
11 Plath and Food
12 Plath and Fashion
13 Experimental Bravery: Plath’s Poetry and Auteur Cinema
14 Plath and Television
15 Plath and Art
Part IV Sexual and Gender Contexts
16 ‘Minor Scandal’: Lesbian Writing Contexts for The Bell Jar
17 ‘Woman-haters Were Like Gods’: The Bell Jar and Violence Against Women in 1950s America
18 Plath and the Culture of Hygiene
Part V Political and Religious Contexts
19 The Bell Jar, the Rosenbergs and the Problem of the Enemy Within
20 Religious Contexts for Plath’s Work
21 Plath and Nature
22 Plath and War
Part VI Biographical Contexts
23 Plath’s Journals
24 Plath’s Teaching and the Shaping of Her Work
25 Electroshock Therapy and Plath’s Convulsive Poetics
26 Plath’s Scrapbooks
27 Beyond Letters Home: Plath’s Unabridged Correspondence
Part VII Plath and Place
28 ‘A Certain Minor Light’: Plath in Brontë Country
29 Plath in London
30 Plath in Devon: Growing Words Out of Isolation
Part VIII The Creative Afterlife
31 An Alternative Afterlife: Plath’s Experimental Poetics
32 British and American Editions of Ariel and The Bell Jar
33 After Plath: The Legacy of Influence
34 P(l)athography: Plath and Her Biographers
Bibliography
Index
