Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath

Anita Helle is Professor of English at Oregon State University, USA and founding Director of the School of Writing, Literature, and Film (2011-2015). She is the editor of The Unravelling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath (2007).Amanda Golden is Assistant Professor of English at the New York Institute of Technology, USA. She is the author of Annotating Modernism (2019) and editor of This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton (2016).Maeve O’Brien is a Teaching Fellow at Ulster University, UK.

The word indispensable can be used indiscriminately at times, but this collection of excellent essays by excellent scholars is the definition of indispensable, both for Plath scholarship and for twenty-first century poetry criticism. Read it. Read all of it.

• List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Note on the Cover Abbreviations Introduction: Approaching Sylvia Plath in the Twenty-First Century Anita HellePart I New Cultural and Historical Contexts1. Plath as Punch Line Jonathan Ellis2. “Get bathrobe and slippers and nightgown & and work on femininity”: Sylvia Plath, Self-Identity, and Sleepwear Rebecca C. Tuite3. Psychiatric Disability and Asylum Fiction: From The Snake Pit to The Bell Jar Elizabeth J. Donaldson4. Sylvia Plath’s Cambridge Di Beddow5. Plath in Space: Feeling the Chill of the Void Tim Hancock6. Spectral Traces, Places, and Sylvia Plath Gail Crowther7. of the Heterotopia: Citizen Critics and Marginalia in Library Copies of Sylvia Plath Christine Walde8. “God’s Lioness” and God’s “Negress”: The Feminine and the Figure of the African American in Plath Jerome Ellison Murphy9. Centering Whiteness: Sylvia Plath’s Literary Apprenticeship Maeve O’Brien10. The Child Reading: Female Stereotypes and Social Authority in Sylvia Plath’s Children’s Stories Lissi Athanasiou-Krikelis11. Lucent Figs and Suave Veal Chops: Sylvia Plath and Food Lynda K. BundtzenPart II Affiliations, Influences, and Intertextualities12. Sylvia Plath’s Greek Tragedy Holly Ranger13. “Yeats I like very very much”: Sylvia Plath and W. B. Yeats Gillian Groszewski14. The Law of Similarity and the Law of Contact: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Sympathetic Magic Katherine Robinson15. “I am a miner”: Long Poems and Literary Succession in Ariel and Crow Jennifer Ryan-Bryant16. “Not Mrs. Hughes and Mrs. Sillitoe”: Sylvia Plath and Ruth Fainlight in the 1960s Heather Clark17. Beelines: Reading Plath through Edith Sitwell and Carol Ann Duffy Marsha Bryant18. Medusa’s Metadata: Aurelia Plath’s Gregg Shorthand Annotations Catherine Rankovic19. “I may hate her, but that’s not all”: Mother–Daughter Intimacy in the Plath Archive Janet BadiaPart III Media and Pedagogy20. Plath and Media Culture Nicola Presley21. “I imagine that a man might not praise it as much”: Reception of “Three Women” and Plath’s BBC-Recorded Poetry Carrie Smith22. Sylvia Plath’s “Three Women”: Producing a Poetics of Listening at the BBC Nerys Williams23. Sylvia Plath’s “The Jailor” as Radical Feminist Text Bethany Hicok24. Archival Pedagogy: Curating Edna O’Brien’s Sylvia Plath Television Play Amanda Golden25. Feminist Recovery, Service Learning, and Community Engagement in a Sylvia Plath Studies Undergraduate Seminar Julie Goodspeed-ChadwickPart IV Editing the Archives26. Sylvia Plath in the Round Karen V. Kukil27. “They will come asking for our letters”: Editing The Letters of Sylvia Plath Peter K. SteinbergBibliography Index