The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath: (Bloomsbury Handbooks)

With chapters written by more than 25 leading and emerging international scholars, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath provides the most comprehensive collection of contemporary scholarship on Plath's work. Including new scholarly perspectives from feminist and gender studies, critical race studies, medical humanities and disability studies, this collection explores: · Plath's literary contexts – from the Classics and the long poem to W.B Yeats, Edith Sitwell, Ruth Sillitoe, Carol Ann Duffy, and Ted Hughes · New insights from Plath's previously unpublished letters and writings · Plath's broadcasting work for the BBC Providing new approaches to her life and work, this book is an indispensable volume for scholars of Sylvia Plath.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Note on the Cover Abbreviations Introduction: Approaching Sylvia Plath in the Twenty-First Century Anita Helle Part I New Cultural and Historical Contexts 1. Plath as Punch Line Jonathan Ellis 2. “Get bathrobe and slippers and nightgown & and work on femininity”: Sylvia Plath, Self-Identity, and Sleepwear Rebecca C. Tuite 3. Psychiatric Disability and Asylum Fiction: From The Snake Pit to The Bell Jar Elizabeth J. Donaldson 4. Sylvia Plath's Cambridge Di Beddow 5. Plath in Space: Feeling the Chill of the Void Tim Hancock 6. Spectral Traces, Places, and Sylvia Plath Gail Crowther 7. of the Heterotopia: Citizen Critics and Marginalia in Library Copies of Sylvia Plath Christine Walde 8. “God's Lioness” and God's “Negress”: The Feminine and the Figure of the African American in Plath Jerome Ellison Murphy 9. Centering Whiteness: Sylvia Plath's Literary Apprenticeship Maeve O'Brien 10. The Child Reading: Female Stereotypes and Social Authority in Sylvia Plath's Children's Stories Lissi Athanasiou-Krikelis 11. Lucent Figs and Suave Veal Chops: Sylvia Plath and Food Lynda K. Bundtzen Part II Affiliations, Influences, and Intertextualities 12. Sylvia Plath's Greek Tragedy Holly Ranger 13. “Yeats I like very very much”: Sylvia Plath and W. B. Yeats Gillian Groszewski 14. The Law of Similarity and the Law of Contact: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Sympathetic Magic Katherine Robinson 15. “I am a miner”: Long Poems and Literary Succession in Ariel and Crow Jennifer Ryan-Bryant 16. “Not Mrs. Hughes and Mrs. Sillitoe”: Sylvia Plath and Ruth Fainlight in the 1960s Heather Clark 17. Beelines: Reading Plath through Edith Sitwell and Carol Ann Duffy Marsha Bryant 18. Medusa's Metadata: Aurelia Plath's Gregg Shorthand Annotations Catherine Rankovic 19. “I may hate her, but that's not all”: Mother–Daughter Intimacy in the Plath Archive Janet Badia Part III Media and Pedagogy 20. Plath and Media Culture Nicola Presley 21. “I imagine that a man might not praise it as much”: Reception of “Three Women” and Plath's BBC-Recorded Poetry Carrie Smith 22. Sylvia Plath's “Three Women”: Producing a Poetics of Listening at the BBC Nerys Williams 23. Sylvia Plath's “The Jailor” as Radical Feminist Text Bethany Hicok 24. Archival Pedagogy: Curating Edna O'Brien's Sylvia Plath Television Play Amanda Golden 25. Feminist Recovery, Service Learning, and Community Engagement in a Sylvia Plath Studies Undergraduate Seminar Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick Part IV Editing the Archives 26. Sylvia Plath in the Round Karen V. Kukil 27. “They will come asking for our letters”: Editing The Letters of Sylvia Plath Peter K. Steinberg Bibliography Index

About the Author :
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.

Review :
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. This substantial compendium of exciting and original scholarship promises to reshape the study of Plath and her work. Helle, Golden, and O'Brien have brought together chapters informed by life writing, pedagogy, disability studies, gender studies, and archive studies, and have positioned Plath among other writers-and her own readers-in ways that thrillingly illuminate her oeuvre. Standout pieces include much-needed interventions on race, upon which those working in Plath studies will hopefully build. Through their judicious and creative selection of essays, the editors of this major contribution offer new thinking about the poet's archive, her readers, her sociohistorical moment, and her cultural significance that have implications for scholars well beyond the single-author field. The editors of this comprehensive collection easily make the case for more scholarly and critical work on Sylvia Plath. They cite her evolving and expanding archive and publications, including a restored edition of Ariel, the edition of Plath's collected letters, and Emory University's recent acquisition of the Harriet Rosenstein papers. Not only are their new things to say about Sylvia Plath, whose “global stature,”needs no defense, there are new approaches to the study of her work and life that this volume explores.