Sylvia Plath / editor, William K. Buckley, Indiana University Northwest.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Buckley, William K., 1946- editor.

Series:

Critical Insights.

Critical Insights

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Plath, Sylvia--Criticism and interpretation.

Plath, Sylvia.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 325 pages).

Place of Publication:

Ipswich, Massachusetts : Salem Press ; Amenia, NY : Grey House Publishing, [2013]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath, (October 27, 1932-February 11, 1963), was talented from the very beginning of her life. She published her first poem at the age of eight in the "children's section" of the Boston Herald, and she said of her childhood: "I want to work at putting together the complex mosaic of my childhood; to practice capturing feelings and experiences from the nebulous seething of memory and yank them out into black-and-white on the typewriter."1 She also said that the sea was a "central metaphor" for her childhood.2 Despite clinical depression, which she suffered from her whole life, and a failed suicide attempt in 1953, Plath graduated from Smith College with highest honors in 1955, and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to Newnham College, at Cambridge, England. At Smith College, Plath won all its major prizes in writing and scholarship. Yet it was in England where she wrote her poems that are considered today to be the most famous by an American female poet of the 20th Century, especially those in her 1965 collection Ariel [reprinted with a "Forward" by her daughter in Ariel: The Restored Edition (Harper Collins, 2004)]. In 1981, Plath's Collected Poems was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the first American poet to win this prize after death. The purpose of this book is to introduce Sylvia Plath in high school and college classrooms. Such introductions are usually conventional: biography, summary of works, and the author's "place" in the history of American literature. This book provides such information. Yet, there is nothing "conventional" about Sylvia Plath. She is a unique, rare, rebellious and unexpected voice in American literature. She's a rebel woman in American literature: "It is Adam's side/This earth I rise from, and I in agony/I cannot undo myself...stepping from this skin/Of old bandages,

boredoms, old faces" (Ariel, 58-59).3.

Contents:

On Sylvia Plath / William K. Buckley

Biography of Sylvia Plath / Peter K. Steinberg

Historical and cultural background for Sylvia Plath's poems / Lynda K. Bundtzen

The current critical reception of Sylvia Plath / Peter K. Steinberg

Story, body, and voice : dating and grouping Sylvia Plath's poems / Tracy Brain

Thinking back through our mothers : Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and contemporary women's poetry / Diann Blakely

"A red-blooded American girl" : gender, American culture, and Sylvia Plath / Jessica McCort

Teaching Plath today / Helen Decker

Sylvia Plath : an American poet / Teresa Marie Laye

The murkiness of The bell jar : questions of genre and depression / Melissa Adamo

"Herr Lucifer" to Satan's words to father as God : the poetry of Sharon Olds and Sylvia Plath / Renee Burch

"Fifteen years between me and bay" : haunting places and the poems of Sylvia Plath / Gail Crowther

Odd notes of a Plath archivist / Kathleen Connors

Terms of art : Plath, the medical lexicon, and the human body in health and disease / Ralph Didlake

That still, blue, almost eternal hour : touching the sacred and the profane in Sylvia Plath's last poems / Cheryl A. Hemmerle.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781429838498

1429838493

OCLC:

846640749