The Haunting of Sylvia Plath

Author: Jacqueline Rose
Publisher: Virago Press
ISBN: 9781853814815
Category : Women poets, American
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Since her suicide in 1963 at the age of 30, Sylvia Plath has become a strange icon. This book addresses why this is the case and what this tells us about the way culture picks out important writers. The author argues that without a concept of fantasy we can understand neither Plath's work nor what she has come to represent. She proposes that no writer demonstrates more forcefully than Plath the importance of inner psychic life for the wider sexual and political world. By the author of Sexuality in the Field of Vision .

The Haunting of Sylvia Plath

Author: Jacqueline Rose
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
Since her death in 1963 at the age of thirty, Sylvia Plath has become a strange icon--an object of intense speculation, of fantasy, repulsion, and desire. Few twentieth-century Western writers have inspired such a range of deeply felt responses: not even her tombstone is allowed to rest in peace. Admirers exalt Plath as a priestess of high art in a degenerate culture, or see her work as an indictment of patriarchal society, as she painfully experienced it in her relationships with her family, her analysts, and her husband, poet Ted Hughes. Detractors, however, see Plath as a seductive, destructive death figure whose solipsistic, negative rantings offend conventional mores and values. In both popular and scholarly circles, there seem to be no middle ground. Jacqueline Rose stands back from the debates, and looks instead at the swirl of controversy, recognizing it as a phenomenon in itself--one with much to tell us about how a culture selects and judges writers; how we hear women's voices; and how we receive messages from, to, and about our unconscious selves. Rose frees Plath from the rigid opposition between psychoanalytic and feminist agendas and offers a new way of understanding Plath and ourselves. --jacket.

Giving Up

Author: Jillian Becker
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0312315988
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 81

Book Description
Giving Up is Jillian Becker’s intimate account of her brief but extraordinary time with Sylvia Plath during the winter of 1963, the last months of the poet’s life. Abandoned by Ted Hughes, Sylvia found companionship and care in the home of Becker and her husband, who helped care for the estranged couple’s two small children while Sylvia tried to rest. In clear-eyed recollections unclouded by the intervening decades, Becker describes the events of Sylvia’s final days and suicide: her physical and emotional state, her grief over Hughes’s infidelity, her mysterious meeting with an unknown companion the night before her suicide, and the harsh aftermath of her funeral. Alongside this tragic conclusion is a beautifully rendered portrait of a friendship between two very different women.

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Author: Sylvia Plath
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307429504
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 767

Book Description
The complete, uncensored journals of Sylvia Plath—essential reading for anyone who has been moved and fascinated by the poet's life and work. "A genuine literary event.... Plath's journals contain marvels of discovery." —The New York Times Book Review Sylvia Plath's journals were originally published in 1982 in a heavily abridged version authorized by Plath's husband, Ted Hughes. This new edition is an exact and complete transcription of the diaries Plath kept during the last twelve years of her life. Sixty percent of the book is material that has never before been made public, more fully revealing the intensity of the poet's personal and literary struggles, and providing fresh insight into both her frequent desperation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons.

These Ghostly Archives

Author: Gail Crowther
Publisher: Fonthill Media
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
The authors discuss Sylvia Plath archival discoveries in unique ways, unearthing previously unknown materials and bringing new context to well-known worksNew essays on the sociological notion of ‘haunting’ in the archiveInnovative approaches to distance/international collaboration in archival scholarshipIntroduces new ways of understanding Sylvia PlathPlath’s The Bell Jar is to be released in 2018 as a major film starring Dakota Fanning and directed by Kirsten Dunst These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath offers a ground-breaking look at Plath studies. Focusing on previously unpublished material found in archives from around the world, These Ghostly Archives aims to reconstruct the ghostly figure of Plath within our culture via unseen letters, manuscripts, photographs, places and poems. This book approaches archival studies exploring both the practical and experiential work carried out in the archive, highlighting the ‘detective’-type work that it involves and the traces left behind from history. However, for the first time, this work also combines the sociological notion of ‘haunting’ - that is, the archive as a location where researchers haunt the research subject and in turn are haunted by the traces left behind. Never is material culture more powerful than when associated with the dead; never is the archive ghostlier when haunted by the absent presence of Plath. This book showcases the necessity to leave no archival box or folder left unopened, and how the researcher and the archive can change even though its documents might stay the same. Illustrations: 32 colour photographs

The Haunted Reader and Sylvia Plath

Author: Gail Crowther
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781781555477
Category : Poets, American
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Book Description
An innovative and unique study exploring why many readers of Sylvia Plath become so attached to her as a cultural figure. By looking at first encounters with Plath's work through to pilgrimages that they make to places where Plath lived, this study explores why readers become so haunted by Plath.

Sylvia Plath

Author: Linda Wagner-Martin
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 9780312023256
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
Recounts the troubled life of the American poet and uses her unpublished letters and journals to depict the feelings that led her to suicide

Your Own, Sylvia

Author: Stephanie Hemphill
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 0307493598
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
On a bleak February day in 1963 a young American poet died by her own hand, and passed into a myth that has since imprinted itself on the hearts and minds of millions. She was and is Sylvia Plath and Your Own, Sylvia is a portrait of her life, told in poems. With photos and an extensive list of facts and sources to round out the reading experience, Your Own, Sylvia is a great curriculum companion to Plath's The Bell Jar and Ariel, a welcoming introduction for newcomers, and an unflinching valentine for the devoted.

Red Comet

Author: Heather Clark
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307961168
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1185

Book Description
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • The highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art. “One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read." —Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller, Untamed With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials, Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant Sylvia Plath, who had precocious poetic ambition and was an accomplished published writer even before she became a star at Smith College. Refusing to read Plath’s work as if her every act was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark considers the sociopolitical context as she thoroughly explores Plath’s world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her troubles with an unenlightened mental health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes; and much more. Clark’s clear-eyed portraits of Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath’s suicide promote a deeper understanding of her final days. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark’s meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over.

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

Author: Sylvia Plath
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006266946X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
"What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. . . . If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; The poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine." — Sylvia Plath, "Cambridge Notes" (From Notebooks, February 1956) Renowned for her poetry, Sylvia Plath was also a brilliant writer of prose. This collection of short stories, essays, and diary excerpts highlights her fierce concentration on craft, the vitality of her intelligence, and the yearnings of her imagination. Featuring an introduction by Plath's husband, the late British poet Ted Hughes, these writings also reflect themes and images she would fully realize in her poetry. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams truly showcases the talent and genius of Sylvia Plath.