Representing Sylvia Plath

Description

Interest in Sylvia Plath continues to grow, as does the mythic status of her relationship with Ted Hughes, but Plath is a poet of enduring power in her own right. This book explores the many layers of her often unreliable and complex representations and the difficult relationship between the reader and her texts. The volume evaluates the historical, familial and cultural sources which Plath drew upon for material: from family photographs, letters and personal history to contemporary literary and cinematic holocaust texts. It examines Plath's creative processes: what she does with materials ranging from Romantic paintings to women's magazine fiction, how she transforms these in multiple drafts and the tools she uses to do this, including her use of colour. Finally the book investigates specific instances when Plath herself becomes the subject matter for other artists, writers, film makers and biographers.

Sally Bayley is Lecturer in English at Balliol College, Oxford. She is co-editor of Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath and the Art of the Visual (2007); and author of Home on the Horizon: America's Search for Space, From Emily Dickinson to Bob Dylan (2010). Tracy Brain is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Bath Spa University. Her book, The Other Sylvia Plath, was published in 2001. She is the author of Dangerous Confessions: The Problem of Reading Sylvia Plath Biographically (2006), Sylvia Plath's Letters and Journals (2006) and Unstable Manuscripts: The Indeterminacy of the Plath Canon (2007). Her essay, 'Ted Hughes and Feminism', will appear in The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (2011).