The other Sylvia Plath / Tracy Brain.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brain, Tracy.

Series:

Longman studies in twentieth-century literature

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Plath, Sylvia--Criticism and interpretation.

Plath, Sylvia.

Women and literature--United States--History--20th century.

Women and literature.

Criticism and interpretation.

United States.

History.

Physical Description:

x, 238 pages, 4 pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Harlow, England ; New York : Longman, 2001.

Summary:

This exciting series provides students of twentieth-century literature with some of the most advanced scholarly and critical work in the field in a lucid and accessible form. Volumes may focus on an individual author or literary movement or address critical and cultural themes and historical moments. The series assumes no particular critical line or theoretical tendency but aims to present the best writing on twentieth-century literature and culture by new and established critics in a way which reveals the remarkable diversity of modern critical approaches. In this exciting new study, Tracy Brain moves away from the endlessly retold story of Sylvia Plath's life to argue that there is another Sylvia Plath: a writer who was much more interested in a world beyond her own skin than critics have allowed. Tracy Brain provides new close readings of stories and poems that have seldom been talked about, or have been discussed in mainly biographical terms.

Plath's unpublished letters are examined, as well as hand-written drafts of poems, typescripts of The Bell Jar and annotated copies of the books that most influenced her. The book also explores the ways in which Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath drafted their poems together and wrote poems in answer to each other. It is also the first volume to look at Plath's home-made art scrapbooks and to analyse the significance of the cover designs and marketing of Plath's work. Providing a fresh new insight into the works of Sylvia Plath, The Other Sylvia Plath is essential reading for students of twentieth-Century Literature, American literature and contemporary poetry, as well as being of interest to those who have a general interest in Plath.

Contents:

Chapter 1 The Outline of the World Comes Clear 1

Packaging Sylvia Plath 1

Where is Sylvia Plath? 12

The Plath Archives 22

Dearly Beloved 31

Chapter 2 Straddling the Atlantic 45

Your Puddle-Jumping Daughter 45

Plath Our Compatriot 50

Where Are We? 59

Alienation and Belonging in the Bee Poems 69

The Foreigner Within 74

Chapter 3 Plath's Environmentalism 84

Prose 91

Circulating Venom 105

The Complications of Masculinity 119

Do You Do No Harm? 128

Chapter 4 The Origins of the Bell Jar 141

Bronte, Woolf and Plath 141

A Comparison 142

The Legacy 145

Woolf and The Bell Jar 147

Rethinking Buddy Willard 151

The Misunderstood Mother and The Bell Jar Manuscripts 153

Sylvia Plath's Villette 155

Chapter 5 A Way of Getting the Poems 176

The Critics on Hughes and Plath 177

Hughes's Story 180

The Reciprocity of Influence between Plath and Hughes 191

The Question of the Confessional 194

Before Birthday Letters 197

Textual Relationships and Poetic Conversations 200

Bleeding Through the Page 203

The Future 207.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 218-229) and index.

ISBN:

0582327296

058232730X

OCLC:

44818416