Despite being widely studied on both undergraduate and postgraduate courses the writing of Sylvia Plath has been relatively neglected in relation to the attention given to her life and what drove her to suicide. Tracy Brain aims to remedy this by introducing completely new approaches to Plath's writing, taking the studies away from the familiar concentration to reveal that Plath as a writer was concerned with a much wider range of important cultural and political topics. Unlike most of the existing literary criticism it shifts the focus away from biographical readings and encompasses the full range of Plath's poetry, prose, journals and letters using a variety of critical methods.
Author(s): Tracy Brain
Series: Longman studies in twentieth-century literature
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Year: 2001
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Plates
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: The Outline of the World Comes Clear
Packaging Sylvia Plath
Where is Sylvia Plath?
The Plath Archives
Dearly Beloved
Chapter 2: Straddling the Atlantic
Your Puddle-Jumping Daughter
Plath Our Compatriot
Where Are We?
Alienation and Belonging in the Bee Poems
The Foreigner Within
Chapter 3: Plath's Environmentalism
Background
Prose
Circulating Venom
The Complications of Masculinity
Do You Do No Harm?
Chapter 4: The Origins of the Bell Jar
Brontë, Woolf and Plath
A Comparison
The Legacy
Woolf and The Bell Jar
Rethinking Buddy Willard
The Misunderstood Mother and The Bell Jar Manuscripts
Sylvia Plath’s Villette
Chapter 5: A Way of Getting the Poems
The Critics on Hughes and Plath
Hughes's Story
The Reciprocity of Influence between Plath and Hughes
The Question of the Confessional
Before Birthday Letters
Textual Relationships and Poetic Conversations
Bleeding Through the Page
The Future
Bibliography
Index
