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Sylvia Plath

A Literary Life

  • Book
  • © 2003

Overview

Authors:
  1. Linda Wagner-Martin

    1. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA

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Part of the book series: Literary Lives (LL)

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Table of contents (13 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xi
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  2. Part One

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1
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    2. The Writing Life

      • Linda Wagner-Martin
      Pages 3-10

    3. Creating Lives

      • Linda Wagner-Martin
      Pages 11-20

    4. Creating the Persona of the Self

      • Linda Wagner-Martin
      Pages 21-32

    5. Recalling the Bell Jar

      • Linda Wagner-Martin
      Pages 33-41

    6. Lifting the Bell Jar

      • Linda Wagner-Martin
      Pages 42-53

    7. Plath’s Hospital Writing

      • Linda Wagner-Martin
      Pages 54-66

    8. Defining Health

      • Linda Wagner-Martin
      Pages 67-79

  3. Part Two

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 81-81
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    2. The Journey Toward Ariel

      • Linda Wagner-Martin
      Pages 83-94

    3. Plath’s Poems about Women

      • Linda Wagner-Martin
      Pages 95-105

    4. Plath’s Triumphant Women Poems

      • Linda Wagner-Martin
      Pages 106-118

    5. Getting Rid of Daddy

      • Linda Wagner-Martin
      Pages 119-132

    6. Sylvia Plath, The Poet and her Writing Life

      • Linda Wagner-Martin
      Pages 133-145

    7. The Usurpation of Sylvia Plath’s Narrative: Hughes’s Birthday Letters

      • Linda Wagner-Martin
      Pages 146-153

  4. Back Matter

    Pages 154-181
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Keywords

About this book

Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life examines the way Plath made herself into a writer. Close analysis of Plath's reading and apprenticeship writing both in fiction and poetry sheds considerable light on Plath's work in the late 1960s. In this updated edition there will be discussion of the aftermath of Plath's death including the publication of her Collected Poems edited by Ted Hughes which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982. Biographies of Plath will be examined along with the publication of Hughes's Birthday Letters . A chronology maps out key events and publications both in Plath's lifetime and posthumously.

Reviews

'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

Authors and Affiliations

  • University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA

    Linda Wagner-Martin

About the author

Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, a Rockefeller awardee, and a resident at Bellagio, Bogliasco, and the Bunting Institute. She recently received the Hubbell Medal for lifetime service to American literature. Her 2013 A History of American Literature from 1950 to the Present is her 53rd book. She has written two other books for this series, one on Ernest Hemingway and the other, in both 1999 and 2003, on Sylvia Plath. She writes widely on twentieth-century American literature, biography, women's writing and pedagogy. Her publications include A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway (2000), William Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism (2002), Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Hemingway: Eight Decades of Criticism (2009).

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