Jo Gill (editor) - The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath

The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath

The controversies that surround Sylvia Plaths life and work mean that her poems are more read and studied now than ever before. This Companion provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of Sylvia Plaths poetry, prose, letters and journals and of their place in twentieth-century culture. These newly commissioned essays by leading international scholars represent a spectrum of critical perspectives. They pay particular attention to key debates and to well-known texts such as Ariel and The Bell Jar , while offering original and thought-provoking readings to new as well as more experienced Plath readers. The Companion also discusses three recent additions to the field: Ted Hughess Birthday Letters , Plaths complete Journals and the Restored edition of Ariel . With its invaluable guide to further reading and chronology of Plaths life and work, this Companion will help students and scholars understand and enjoy Plaths work and its continuing relevance.

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO

SYLVIA PLATH

EDITED BY

JO GILL

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521844963

Cambridge University Press 2006

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2006

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

ISBN-13 978-0-521-84496-3 hardback

ISBN-10 0-521-84496-7 hardback

ISBN-13 978-0-521-60685-1 paperback

ISBN-10 0-521-60685-3 paperback

Transferred to digital printing 2007

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS

SUSAN R. VAN DYNE

DEBORAH NELSON

LYNDA K. BUNDTZEN

LINDA WAGNER-MARTIN

ALICE ENTWISTLE

STEVEN GOULD AXELROD

JO GILL

CHRISTINA BRITZOLAKIS

JANET BADIA

TRACY BRAIN

DIANE MIDDLEBROOK

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

STEVEN GOULD AXELROD is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words (1990) and Robert Lowell: Life and Art (1978) and has co-written or edited many other books including Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry (1986), Critical Essays on Wallace Stevens (1988) and Critical Essays on William Carlos Williams (1995). He has published more than forty articles and is now researching a book-length study of Cold War poetry.

JANET BADIA is Assistant Professor of Twentieth-Century American Literature at Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia. Her research interests include confessional poetry, autobiography and book history, especially the study of readers and reception. She is co-editor of Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present (2005). She is currently completing a book manuscript on Plath, Anne Sexton and women readers.

TRACY BRAIN is Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, where she runs the PhD in Creative Writing Programme. She is the author of The Other Sylvia Plath (2001). In addition to the essay in the present volume, Tracy Brain has recently written on Plath in Jo Gill (ed.), Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays (2005) and in Anita Helle (ed.), The Unravelling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath (2006).

CHRISTINA BRITZOLAKIS is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (1999) and has published articles on modernist poetry, fiction and drama, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. Her current research is concerned with visuality and technology in international modernist culture.

LYNDA K. BUNDTZEN is Herbert H. Lehman Professor of English at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She is the author of two books on Sylvia Plath: Plaths Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process (1983) and The Other Ariel (2001). Her other writings include several essays on film and feminist theory and on other women poets.

ALICE ENTWISTLE is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of the West of England, Bristol. She has published widely on late twentieth-century Anglo-American poetics, concentrating in recent years on poetry written by women. She is the author, with Jane Dowson, of A History of Twentieth Century British Womens Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

JO GILL is Lecturer in American Literature at Bath Spa University. She is the editor of Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays (2005) and the author of a new study of the work of Anne Sexton. She has published extensively on modern British and American poetry.

DIANE MIDDLEBROOK is a professional writer and Professor of English Emerita at Stanford University, California. Among her books are Anne Sexton A Biography (finalist for the 1991 National Book Award in the USA); Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton (1998) and Her Husband: Hughes and Plath A Marriage (2003). Middlebrook is an Honorary Member of Christs College, University of Cambridge.

DEBORAH NELSON is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. Her first book, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (2001), examines confessional poetry in relation to Supreme Court privacy doctrine. She is currently working on a book called Tough Broads on women artists and intellectuals in the postwar era.

SUSAN R. VAN DYNE is Professor and Chair of Womens Studies at Smith College, Massachusetts. She is the author of Revising Life: Sylvia Plaths Ariel Poems (1993) and co-editor of Womens Place in the Academy: Transforming the Liberal Arts (1985). She is currently working on a book titled Proving Grounds: The Politics of Reading Contemporary Women Poets .

LINDA WAGNER-MARTIN is Hanes Professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and has published fifty books on modern and mid-century American writers. She has held Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEH, and other fellowships. Recent biographies are of Barbara Kingsolver and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. Her work on Plath includes her 1987 book, Sylvia Plath: A Biography , available in many languages; Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (1999, 2nd edition 2003); and several collections of essays on Plaths work.

PREFACE

The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath offers a critical overview of Plaths writing (predominantly the poetry, but also fiction, letters and journals) and of its place in twentieth-century literature and culture. The eleven specially commissioned essays in the collection are the work of leading international scholars in the field and represent a spectrum of critical perspectives and practices.

The book is divided into two sections. The first section discusses Plaths writing in relation to relevant contexts and perspectives (exploring the temptations and limitations of reading her work biographically, the insights to be gained by examining its historical and ideological contexts, the difficulties and rewards of adopting a psychoanalytic perspective and the influence of her writing on contemporary American and British poetry). The aim here is to show that Plaths work is not entire unto itself; that it emerged in particular historical, ideological, literary and personal contexts, and, moreover, that the figure of Plath we may think we know is a product of a complex, mutable and contested tissue of discourses. These essays combine a critical awareness of key issues and debates in Plath studies with incisive readings of the poetry and prose; their intention is to inform and to stimulate the readers own engagement with the writing.