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The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath
“Up to the minute and also deeply historicized—each reading of Plath’s poems is grounded in and examines larger patterns in her work or in the cultural reception of her writing.”
—Susan Van Dyne, Smith College
“Anita Helle’s collection of largely new essays on Sylvia Plath updates the continuing process of the important evaluation of her many-faceted works. I especially like the way established critics are juxtaposed with younger/newer scholars: the dialogue Helle creates here is appropriately exciting.”
—Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Since Sylvia Plath’s spectacular poems were announced to the world nearly a half century ago, fascination with the poet has never waned. In the past decade alone, Plath has been the subject of a new cultural explosion of interest—there have been novels, a feature film, and an array of public conferences, performances, and exhibitions, creating new conversations among different generations of scholars and readers. But because the posthumous record was incomplete—and in some cases, altered—the variety of distinctive materials Plath brought to her poetry has only recently been understood.
The publication of Plath’s Unabridged Journals, a “restored edition” of her Ariel poems, and Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, along with fresh attention to archives of periodical and popular culture, have provoked new readings of Plath and shed new light on her creative life and art. The Unraveling Archive provides a new assessment of Plath’s creative life and work in light of an abundance of new material, offering essays that respond to new discoveries about familiar and neglected works.
The book includes reproductions of two of Plath’s original paintings from the 1950s and photographs rarely seen before, along with essays by Janet Badia, Tracy Brain, Marsha Bryant, Lynda K. Bundtzen, Kathleen Connors, Sandra Gilbert, Anita Helle, Ann Keniston, Diane Middlebrook, Kate Moses, and Robin Peel.
Anita Helle is Associate Professor of English at Oregon State University.
—Susan Van Dyne, Smith College
“Anita Helle’s collection of largely new essays on Sylvia Plath updates the continuing process of the important evaluation of her many-faceted works. I especially like the way established critics are juxtaposed with younger/newer scholars: the dialogue Helle creates here is appropriately exciting.”
—Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Since Sylvia Plath’s spectacular poems were announced to the world nearly a half century ago, fascination with the poet has never waned. In the past decade alone, Plath has been the subject of a new cultural explosion of interest—there have been novels, a feature film, and an array of public conferences, performances, and exhibitions, creating new conversations among different generations of scholars and readers. But because the posthumous record was incomplete—and in some cases, altered—the variety of distinctive materials Plath brought to her poetry has only recently been understood.
The publication of Plath’s Unabridged Journals, a “restored edition” of her Ariel poems, and Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, along with fresh attention to archives of periodical and popular culture, have provoked new readings of Plath and shed new light on her creative life and art. The Unraveling Archive provides a new assessment of Plath’s creative life and work in light of an abundance of new material, offering essays that respond to new discoveries about familiar and neglected works.
The book includes reproductions of two of Plath’s original paintings from the 1950s and photographs rarely seen before, along with essays by Janet Badia, Tracy Brain, Marsha Bryant, Lynda K. Bundtzen, Kathleen Connors, Sandra Gilbert, Anita Helle, Ann Keniston, Diane Middlebrook, Kate Moses, and Robin Peel.
Anita Helle is Associate Professor of English at Oregon State University.
- GenresPoetryLiterary Criticism
298 pages, Paperback
First published August 31, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 9, 2010
Fabulous, fabulous book. This collection of essays evades the torturous limbo so much Plath criticism falls into and offers a fresh, deeply historicized, and engagingly smart glimpse into what Plath studies can be at its best. There's not a weak piece in here (though Middlebrook's essay is essentially lifted out of Her Husband, and I'd have liked to see something new from her); in fact, I'm having trouble recalling my favorites, because each essay brought something powerful to the table. There's little lingering on the biographical Jacob's Ladder of Plath's legacy--indeed, only one essay zeroes in on Plath's more (in)famous work, namely "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," but does so from an innovative place, locating these poems solidly within the relatively new field of trauma studies. Ann Keniston thus saves these works from decades of dismissal on the basis of their Holocaust metonyms, and rethinks them as socio-politically engaged pieces elucidating the fragmentary quality of narrating nearly unfathomable traumas.
The entire book benefits from a recent upsurge in Plath's canon--from Frieda Hughes's restored Ariel to the 'unabridged' journals, to the publication of Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, and there is a correlative interest in the nooks and crannies of the Plath archives. Thus, there's an essay on Plath's 'political education,' based through her really early journals and academic papers (mostly high school); there's another on the variances between the published Ariel poems and their audio counterparts, where Plath frequently made significant changes ("Nick and the Candlestick" being the most interesting example, to my mind); another essay attempts to refigure Plath's publication in the Ladies' Home Journal as a mutually productive encounter that allows her to engage with what the author (Marsha Bryant) terms the 'domestic surreal.' Still yet, there's an essay on the pathologization of Plath--specifically Bell Jar--readers in mainstream film, used to question what ideologies come to bat when we speak of 'aggressively female' literature or readership; a stunning essay by Sandra Gilbert on the sorely unappreciated "Berck Plage"; and the editor, Anita Helle, writes on the power of Plath photography--something I would never even think to consider.
That's really the great power of this collection; each essay approaches a topic that has always fallen beneath the radar--or, when the topic has been broached before, here it is looked at anew. If you've got any scholarly interest in Plath, this book should prove invaluable. I'm sadly returning my copy to the library, but I'm hoping I'll find a nice copy on half.com soon to bring home with me.
The entire book benefits from a recent upsurge in Plath's canon--from Frieda Hughes's restored Ariel to the 'unabridged' journals, to the publication of Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, and there is a correlative interest in the nooks and crannies of the Plath archives. Thus, there's an essay on Plath's 'political education,' based through her really early journals and academic papers (mostly high school); there's another on the variances between the published Ariel poems and their audio counterparts, where Plath frequently made significant changes ("Nick and the Candlestick" being the most interesting example, to my mind); another essay attempts to refigure Plath's publication in the Ladies' Home Journal as a mutually productive encounter that allows her to engage with what the author (Marsha Bryant) terms the 'domestic surreal.' Still yet, there's an essay on the pathologization of Plath--specifically Bell Jar--readers in mainstream film, used to question what ideologies come to bat when we speak of 'aggressively female' literature or readership; a stunning essay by Sandra Gilbert on the sorely unappreciated "Berck Plage"; and the editor, Anita Helle, writes on the power of Plath photography--something I would never even think to consider.
That's really the great power of this collection; each essay approaches a topic that has always fallen beneath the radar--or, when the topic has been broached before, here it is looked at anew. If you've got any scholarly interest in Plath, this book should prove invaluable. I'm sadly returning my copy to the library, but I'm hoping I'll find a nice copy on half.com soon to bring home with me.
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May 4, 2013Our understanding of Sylvia Plath--an influence felt not only through my generation, whose mothers were born around the same time as she, i.e., 1932, but in the one following--has been greatly widened in recent years via *Birthday Letters*, Ted Hughes’ best-selling poetic chronicle of his life with Plath; the woefully underrated feature film *Sylvia*, with superb performances both by Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig in the starring roles; the selling of Hughes’ papers to Emory University; and the publication of his letters.
Now there’s the appearance of this volume, which juxtaposes well-known Plath scholars like Lydia Bundtzen and Kate Moses (whose best work on Plath remains her novel, *Wintering*)) with newer writers like Tracy Brain, whose focus is Plath’s political and cultural concerns, and Kathleen Connors, co-editor of *Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual*. Thus we read *The Unraveling Archive* not as another collection of biographical takes on Plath’s work, but as a series of new, and surprising, kaleidoscopic revelations.
(originally printed in *The Tennesseean)
Now there’s the appearance of this volume, which juxtaposes well-known Plath scholars like Lydia Bundtzen and Kate Moses (whose best work on Plath remains her novel, *Wintering*)) with newer writers like Tracy Brain, whose focus is Plath’s political and cultural concerns, and Kathleen Connors, co-editor of *Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual*. Thus we read *The Unraveling Archive* not as another collection of biographical takes on Plath’s work, but as a series of new, and surprising, kaleidoscopic revelations.
(originally printed in *The Tennesseean)
July 3, 2015
Say what you will, but this is a great collection of essays on Sylvia Plath.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews