The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath - (Bloomsbury Handbooks) by Anita Helle & Amanda Golden & Maeve O'Brien (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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- New insights from Plath's previously unpublished letters and writings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.

Review Quotes

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.
Feminist Modernist Studies Journal

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.

Philip McGowan, Professor of American Literature, Queen's University Belfast, UK

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.
Janine Utell, author of Literary Couples and 20th-Century Life Writing: Narrative and Intimacy

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.