Sylvia Plath In Context: Essays edited by Tracy Brain

Published today by the Cambridge University Press is Sylvia Plath In Context, edited by Tracy Brain (Amazon.co.uk).

From the book blurb on CUP's website:

Sylvia Plath in Context brings together an exciting combination of established and emerging thinkers from a range of disciplines. The book reveals Plath's responses to the writers she reads, her interventions in the literary techniques and forms she encounters, and the wide range of cultural, personal, artistic, political, historical and geographical influences that shaped her work. Many of these essays confront the specific challenges for reading Sylvia Plath today. Others evaluate her legacy to the writers who followed her. Reaching well beyond any simple equation in which biographical cause results in literary effect, all of them argue for a body of work that emerges from Plath's deep involvement in the world she inhabits. Situating Plath's writing within a wide frame of references that reach beyond any single notion of self, this book will be a vital resource for students, scholars, instructors and researchers of Sylvia Plath.

Below is a list of the essays in volume.

Part I. Literary Contexts:
1. Plath and the American poetry scene by Jonathan Ellis
2. The dominant trends in British poetry of the 1950s and early 1960s by Eleanor Spencer
3. Plath and the classics by Holly Ranger
4. Plath and the radio drama by Andrew Walker
5. 'Sincerely yours': Plath and The New Yorker by Peter K. Steinberg

Part II. Literary Technique and Influence:
6. Plath in the context of Stevie Smith by Noreen Masud
7. Plath's whimsy by Will May
8. Sylvia Plath and you by Tracy Brain
9. Plath and the lyric by Lucy Tunstall
10. Plath and the pastoral by Iain Twiddy

Part III. Cultural Contexts:
11. Plath and food by Gerard Woodward
12. Plath and fashion by Rebecca C. Tuite
13. Experimental bravery: Plath's poetry and auteur cinema by Lynda Bundtzen
14. Plath and television by Nicola Presley
15. Plath and art by Jane Hedley

Part IV. Sexual and Gender Contexts:
16. 'Minor scandal': queer writing contexts for The Bell Jar by Beatrice Hitchman
17. 'Woman-haters were like gods': The Bell Jar and violence against women in 1950s America by Kate Harding
18. Sylvia Plath and the culture of hygiene by Laura Perry

Part V. Political and Religious Contexts:
19. The Bell Jar, the Rosenbergs and the problem of the enemy within by Robin Peel
20. Religious contexts for Sylvia Plath's work by Gail Crowther
21. Plath and nature by Richard Kerridge
22. Plath and war by Cornelia Pearsall

Part VI. Biographical Contexts:
23. Sylvia Plath's journals by Sally Bayley
24. Plath's teaching and the shaping of her work by Amanda Golden
25. Electroshock therapy and Plath's convulsive poetics by Anita Helle
26. Plath's scrapbooks by Peter K. Steinberg
27. Beyond letters home: Plath's unabridged correspondence by Karen V. Kukil

Part VII. Plath and Place:
28. 'A certain minor light': Sylvia Plath in Brontë country by Sarah Corbett
29. Plath in London by Elaine Feinstein
30. Plath in Devon: growing words out of isolation by Maeve O'Brien

Part VIII. The Creative Afterlife:
31. An alternative afterlife: Plath's experimental poetics by Gareth Farmer
32. British and American editions of Ariel and The Bell Jar by Elena Rebollo-Cortés
33. After Plath: the legacy of influence by Fiona Sampson
34. P(l)athography: Sylvia Plath and her biographers by Heather Clark

The book is expensive, coming in at £85.00. The ISBN is 978-1108470131. It will be available in the US on 30 September 2019 for $110 (Amazon.com).

All links accessed 14 and 22 August 2019.

Update on The Selected Writings of Assia Wevill

Recently I received a comment on The Selected Writings of Assia Wevill book announcement post  asking for an update on the book that I am fortunate enough to be co-editing with Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, author of the forthcoming Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination (LSU Press). Julie and I are happy to provide this, however briefly.

We have compiled the first draft of the manuscript which consists of four parts: Letters, Journals, Poems, and Miscellaneous texts. All sections have been annotated with contextual footnotes. In addition, we are presently working on our introduction and the selection of images and illustrations. In the coming months we'll continue read and proof the text, try to add more information to the footnotes if we can, and try to locate more documents to include. This autumn I am going to work on building an index, because I enjoy punishing myself in nerdtastic ways.

Happily, we are on schedule to have the manuscript to our publisher, the Louisiana State University Press, by our deadline of 31 December 2019.

All links accessed 12 August 2019.

P.S. Because I have not so far—and cannot fathom posting something here without typing it—Sylvia Plath.

Sylvia Plath's fireflies

Sylvia Plath's first published poem appeared on 10 August 1941, seventy-eight years ago today. It appeared on the "Good Sport" page of the Boston Herald, page 8.

The printed poem is brief: just four lines. The subject of the poem is what the young poet heard and saw in summer evenings: crickets and fireflies which "Twinkle as they pass." I am presenting KICKING myself because this should have been in Volume 1 of The Letters of Sylvia Plath. I am seriously the most rubbish editor ever. See this blog post for more information on the poem and the letter.

Earlier this summer, or was it spring?, I was visiting some family and noticed a number of fireflies, aka lightning bugs. Of course, I thought of Plath immediately and so I immediately captured a short video of them as it had been a number of years since I had seen such a preponderance of the lovely bugs. When I was growing up we used to run around in the evening collecting them in mason jars. (We made air holes so they did not die.) We would keep them for a night and let them illuminate our bedroom and then set the free the next day.

I do recommend watching several times, in dark room, to see the fireflies flick and flash.



 All links accessed 4 August 2019.

Faber reissues Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar

On 26 July 2019, Faber and Faber tweeted out a lovely photograph featuring a person holding a copy of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath seated on some grass.

'It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York . . .'
Our gorgeous new paperback of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, with cover artwork inspired by Faber's 1966 edition, is out now. pic.twitter.com/pJ77K14N9a

— Faber & Faber (@FaberBooks) July 26, 2019

And then today, they tweeted out that the novel is officially reissued.

However, I have not seen the book listed either on their website or on Amazon.co.uk, but it is a beautiful looking cover which pays homage to their original 1966 edition.

A gallery of historical Bell Jar covers can be seen over on my website.

All links accessed 30 July 2019 and 1 August 2019.