Representing Sylvia Plath

by Bayley, Sally; Brain, Tracy

• ISBN13: 9781107006751
• ISBN10: 1107006759
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-09-30
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

Interest in Sylvia Plath continues to grow, as does the mythic status of her relationship with Ted Hughes, but Plath is a poet of enduring power in her own right. This book explores the many layers of her often unreliable and complex representations and the difficult relationship between the reader and her texts. The volume evaluates the historical, familial and cultural sources which Plath drew upon for material: from family photographs, letters and personal history to contemporary literary and cinematic holocaust texts. It examines Plath's creative processes: what she does with materials ranging from Romantic paintings to women's magazine fiction, how she transforms these in multiple drafts and the tools she uses to do this, including her use of colour. Finally the book investigates specific instances when Plath herself becomes the subject matter for other artists, writers, film makers and biographers.

Table of Contents

Introduction: 'Purdah' and the enigma of representation

Contexts

'Mailed into space': on Sylvia Plath's letters

'The photographic chamber of the eye': Plath photography, and the post-confessional muse

'O the tangles of that old bed': fantasies of incest and the 'Daddy' narrative in Ariel

Plath and torture: cultural contexts for Plath's imagery of the Holocaust

Poetics and Composition

'The trees of the mind are black, the light is blue': sublime encounters in Sylvia Plath's tree poems

Coming to terms with colour: Plath's visual aesthetic

Madonna (of the refrigerator): mapping Sylvia Plath's double in 'The Babysitters' drafts

'Procrustean identity': Sylvia Plath's women's magazine fiction

Representation

Confession, contrition, and concealment: evoking Plath in Ted Hughes's 'Howls and Whispers'

Fictionalising Sylvia Plath

Primary representations: three artists respond to

Adolescent Plath - 'the girl who would be God'

Bodily imprints: a choreographic response to Sylvia Plath's Poppy Poems Kate Flatt

Stella Vine's peanut crunching Plath

Bibliography

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.