Sylvia Plath http://www.fishpond.co.nz/Books/Sylvia-Plath-Linda-Wagner-Martin/9780230505926

A Literary Life (Literary Lives)

By Linda Wagner-Martin

Table of Contents

Chronology PART I The Writing Life Creating Lives Creating the Persona of the Self Recalling the Bell Jar Lifting the Bell Jar Plath's Hospital Writing Defining Health PART II The Journey Toward Ariel Plath's Poems about Women Plath's Triumphant Woman Poems Getting Rid of Daddy Sylvia Plath, The Poet and Her Writing Life The Usurpation of Sylvia Plath's Narrative: Hughes's Birthday Letters Notes Bibliography (selected), Primary and Secondary Index

About the Author

LINDA WAGNER-MARTIN is the Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina. She is the author of more than forty books on American writers and genres - among them Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Anne Sexton, Robert Frost, Denise Levertov, John Dos Passos, and Sylvia Plath. The recipient of awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and others, she has been a Bunting Institute fellow and the President of the Hemingway Foundation. Among recent books are: William Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism, A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway, a biography of Gertrude Stein, and her co-edited encyclopaedia, The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States. She has also written Sylvia Plath, A Biography (1988).

Reviews

Feminist icon and patron saint of moody coffeehouse poets, Sylvia Plath has been so overexposed that it is hard to see her with fresh eyes. This book, part of a useful series that focuses on writers' working lives, builds on such works as Jacqueline Rose's The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Harvard Univ., 1992) to remind readers that, Plath's well-known personal suffering notwithstanding, "to read autobiographically...is to dismiss the artistry Plath demands of her writing, and often achieves in it." Thus, this study marks less a paradigm shift in Plath studies than a cutting away of the inessential and a consolidation of the best that is known. Collections that already have a substantial number of Plath studies, including Wagner-Martin's own Sylvia Plath: A Biography (1987), may not wish to add yet another item to an already groaning shelf, but readers who are familiar with Plath's writing and want to know more about its personal and professional contexts would do well to begin with this succinct, commonsensical study.ÄDavid Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

'Readers who are familiar with Plath's writing and want to know more about its personal and professional contexts would do well to begin with this succinct, commonsensical study.' Library Journal