Day 4 - Sylvia Plath's Fiction: A Critical Study by Luke Ferretter and The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath edited by Anita Helle On the fourth day of Plathmaszaa my true love gave to me Books to put Plath's works in context In Sylvia Plath's Fiction: A Critical Study , Luke Ferretter breathes life back into Plath's prose which largely has been ignored. One may want to buy Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams  too, and, while you are at it, request photocopies of Plath's short stories from the archives (primarily from Smith College, Indiana University and Emory University) to help as you read this book. And, the journey into archive of Plath has never been so fully examined as in The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath edited by Anita Helle. Though published in 2007, this book has not lost any relevance, and remains among the most important works on Plath to ever see the light of day. In two parts, "The Plath Archive" and "...

This afternoon was also a good - no, a great - way to conclude the Symposium. As with the other post today, I've just decided to post my notes, relatively unedited! Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick: "Sylvia Plath and Trauma: Reading the October 1962 Poems" Part of a book on modernist and contemporary poets. Two terms in trauma studies are "acting out": nightmares and reliving experiences and "working through": the process of the subject trying to make sense of the traumatic experience. Attempts to come with a narrative that hangs together about that experience, enables her/him to begin to work through it, to put the episode behind her. "A Birthday Present" Calm and resigned voice anticipates "Edge" and "Words". Line "I am alive only by accident" is the trauma event about which the speaker needs to work through. Trauma leads to a fetishization of death. "Lady Lazarus" Founding trauma is part and parce...

Grace Schulman's recent First loves and other adventures is now available from University of Michigan Press series Poets on poetry. In Schulman's book is the chapter "Plath and Yaddo". This title was published on January 15, 2010. University of Michigan Press also brought us the incomparable The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath edited by Anita Helle. Plath's library on LibraryThing is slowly growing. It is now exceeds 500 books. The Helm Fellowship to Indiana University is massively responsible for this growth. I have dozens of pages of titles left to add, so please bear with me. I'll add further posts at random milestones. Later... On second notice, it appears that Schulman's "Plath and Yaddo" is reprinted. It appeared also in Paul Alexander's Ariel Ascending: Writings about Sylvia Plath (1985). So, not the new publication I was hoping it would be.

2007 review 2007 marked the 75th anniversary of Plath's birth, and it was an interesting and exciting year for the late poet. Several books were published, including three unique compilations of essays and a work of biographical poems. One book, Linda Wagner-Martin's Sylvia Plath's Poetry , was delayed for various reasons, disappointing many, including myself. The book is now scheduled for release on 7 August 2008. Books about Sylvia Plath that were published this year include: The Unraveling Archive: essays on Sylvia Plath edited by Anita Helle Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual edited by Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's rival and Ted Hughes's doomed love by Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren Chapters in a mythology: the poetry of Sylvia Plath by Judith Kroll Sylvia Plath (Bloom's Modern Critical Views) edited by Harold Bloom Your own, Sylvia: a verse portrait of Sylvia Plath by Stephanie Hemphill Le...

The two images to the below are of the last two stanzas in Sylvia Plath's poem "Point Shirley" which appeared in her first collection of poetry, The Colossus and other poems . The Colossus and other poems , like The Bell Jar , has three different first editions. There is the Heinemann edition of October 1960; the Knopf edition of May 1962; and the Faber edition of 1967. The monetary value of each declines with each subsequent publisher making the Heinemann both highly desirable and expensive, and the Faber edition less desirable and less expensive. Ariel , Crossing the Water , Winter Trees , and other later Plath books (excepting the abridged Journals) were exclusively published by Faber in England and Harper & Row (HarperCollins) in the America. The top image is from the first Knopf edition; the bottom is from the first Faber edition. Can you find the difference? The typographical error is almost unnoticeable. I've read the poem dozens of times but only ...

The Harvard Book Store and other fine bookstores across the nation are now selling The Unraveling Archive : essays on Sylvia Plath edited by Anita Helle, Associate Professor of English at Oregon State University.

The Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College recently posted opened the "Helle collection of Plath family photographs, 1910-1963." The collection is .5 linear feet (or 1 box). The abstract for the collection reads, "This collection of Plath family photographs includes photographs of Otto Plath and his siblings, of Aurelia Schober Plath, Warren and Sylvia Plath and various other Schober relatives."

The following is a list of anticipated publications in 2007 about Plath. This list will be revised and updated in new posts as soon as information is available. It appears to be an active year of Plath scholarship; let's hope that the essays and longer works contribute new ideas and perspectives on Plath's writing and life. The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath. Edited by Anita Helle. Published by University of Michigan Press, forthcoming. Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath. By Stephanie Hemphill. Published by Knopf Books for Young Readers, 13 March 2007. Sylvia Plath (Bloom's Modern Critical Views). Edited by Harold Bloom. Published by Chelsea House, 30 March 2007. Sylvia Plath's Poetry (Reader's Guides). By Linda Wagner-Martin. Published by Continuum International Publishing Group, 8 May 2007. Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual. Edited by Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley. Published by Oxford University Press, Fall 2007.