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Showing posts from May, 2017

These Ghostly Archives: power, politics and silences

The following is a guest blog post by Gail Crowther, co-author of the recently published These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath (Fonthill).  You can read a companion guest blog post by me, "Entering These Ghostly Archives" on Gail's website. These Ghostly Archives: power, politics and silences by Gail Crowther As Peter and I note in the opening pages of our new book These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath , archives are not only magical places, they are places of power and politics too. And the power seems to operate in a number of different ways: the experiential power of holding original documents, the power and privilege to study in an archive, and the power behind who gets to have an archive of work in the first place. Much is about access and opportunity. Often we speak of ‘the archive’ as though it were some kind of monolithic, static space. Yet what we discovered as we worked on a series of papers between 2009-2013, and su

These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath Out Now!!!!

These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath by Gail Crowther and Peter K. Steinberg (hey...that's me!) is officially published by Fonthill Media as of today, 11 May 2017. We sincerely hope that if you read the book you enjoy it. These Ghostly Archives  is available online via  the publisher ,  Amazon.co.uk ,  Book Depository ,  and other websites. These Ghostly Archives  will be published in the United States on  3 October 2017 . All links accessed 11 May 2017.

Sylvia Plath's High School Scrapbook

The following is a catalog of the items in Sylvia Plath's high school scrapbook held by the Lilly Library in Plath mss II, Oversize 3. The scrapbook is heavily annotated by Plath and, as the writing is under copyright, is not included here. However, I think the rest of it is fair game to present and to describe. For this, I assigned three broad categories to the items in the scrapbook: Photographs, Attachments, and Clippings. Attachments take many different formats including cards, letters, and pressed flowers, to name a few. I have researched as many of the items herein and, as much as possible, I attempt to provide information about the things which Plath collected and preserved to document her life and times. For the clippings, I have tried to identify all the periodicals from which the thing was taken. Sadly, a number of items from the scrapbook are missing. Plath purchased this scrapbook on 1 February 1947 and immediately started pasting in the first pages photographs and