Sylvia Plath

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

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2. Part One

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

      PDF

   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

      PDF

   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

4. Back Matter

   Pages 146-172

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Linda Wagner-Martin's emphasis in this study is the way Sylvia Plath made herself into a writer. In keeping with the critic's early ground-breaking work on American poet William Carlos Williams, she here studies elements of Plath's work with dedication to discussions of style and effect. Her close analysis of Plath's reading and her apprenticeship writing both in fiction and poetry sheds considerable light into Plath's work in the late 1960s. The book concludes with a section assessing Sylvia Plath's current standing.

• fiction
• poem
• poet
• poetry

• University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA

  Linda Wagner-Martin

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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