The Other Sylvia Plath

by Brain; Tracy

• ISBN13: 9780582327306
• ISBN10: 058232730X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2001-03-21
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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 Biography

Tracy Brain lectures in English and Creative Writing at Bath Spa University College

Table of Contents

List of Plates	vii
Acknowledgements	ix
The Outline of the World Comes Clear	1	(44)
Packaging Sylvia Plath	1	(11)
Where is Sylvia Plath?	12	(10)
The Plath Archives	22	(9)
Dearly Beloved	31	(14)
Straddling the Atlantic	45	(39)
Your Puddle-Jumping Daughter	45	(5)
Plath Our Compatriot	50	(9)
Where Are We?	59	(10)
Alienation and Belonging in the Bee Poems	69	(5)
The Foreigner Within	74	(10)
Plath's Environmentalism	84	(57)
Background	84	(7)
Prose	91	(14)
Circulating Venom	105	(14)
The Complications of Masculinity	119	(9)
Do You Do No Harm?	128	(13)
The Origins of the Bell Jar	141	(35)
Bronte, Woolf and Plath	141	(1)
A Comparison	142	(3)
The Legacy	145	(2)
Woolf and The Bell Jar	147	(4)
Rethinking Buddy Willard	151	(2)
The Misunderstood Mother and The Bell Jar Manuscripts	153	(2)
Sylvia Plath's Villette	155	(21)
A Way of Getting the Poems	176	(42)
The Critics on Hughes and Plath	177	(3)
Hughes's Story	180	(11)
The Reciprocity of Influence between Plath and Hughes	191	(3)
The Question of the Confessional	194	(3)
Before Birthday Letters	197	(3)
Textual Relationships and Poetic Conversations	200	(3)
Bleeding Through the Page	203	(4)
The Future	207	(11)
Bibliography	218	(13)
Index	231