Representing Sylvia Plath

by Sally Bayley

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 from family photographs, letters and personal history to contemporary literary and cinematic holocaust texts. It examines Plath's creative 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literature

Hardcover

First published June 27, 2011

About the author

Dr Sally Bayley is a tutor in English at Balliol and St. Hugh’s Colleges, Oxford and a member of the Oxford University English Faculty. She is the author of Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual (Oxford University Press, 2007). Eye Rhymes was the first study of Plath’s art work in relation to her body of poetry and prose and was featured in the Sunday Times magazine, on Radio 4 and at the Royal Festival Hall alongside a series of uniquely commissioned pieces of theatre, dance, art and animation, several of which won awards.

In 2007 alongside the publication of Eye Rhymes Sally Bayley commissioned a play exploring the representation of Sylvia Plath's biography. The award winning play, I Wish I Had A Sylvia Plath, a one woman show written and performed by Elisabeth Gray, will run Off Broadway for the month of October 2010. The play will feature alongside a symposium at New York University and will include the director and producer of the forthcoming film adaptation of Plath's novel The Bell Jar: Tristine Skyer and Julia Stiles.

Source: http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/about-fac...

Reviews

[Carl Rollyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

So many books have already been devoted to Sylvia Plath that another may seem superfluous for all but her most devoted readers. But this collection, edited and written by the best Plath scholars in the field, is precisely what her readers need. Fresh discussion of Plath's letters and poetry, her treatment of the Holocaust, her visual esthetic, her contributions to magazine fiction, the fiction written about her, and the artists who have been inspired by her work make this a comprehensive, up-to-date introduction to the great variety of Plath's output and to the way scholars have built on several generations of commentary. Students of biography, culture, literature, literary criticism, and even art history will find much to stimulate them in this volume. An excellent bibliography includes both books and articles about Plath and also about the subject matter her writing touches on. A detailed index helps to track the discussion of individual poems across several different essays. Thus Plath emerges from this collection as not only a protean literary figure but as a cultural icon whose significance defies neat categorization by academic discipline.

[Diann Blakely]

Remarks included in review of Heather Clark's THE GRIEF OF INFLUENCE: SYLVIA PLATH & TED HUGHES, to be expanded upon in a poet's memoir I'm writing for PLATH PROFILES, where the item on Clark will be published.

[Moira]

WHOO this is on Kindle!

.....at a whopping $55, what the shit. Even then 'You Save: $30.60 (36%)'. Gahh.