Book contents
- Sylvia Plath in Context
- Sylvia Plath in Context
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology
- Abbreviations and Textual Note
- Key Archives
- Introduction
- Part I Literary Contexts
- Part II Literary Technique and Influence
- Part III Cultural Contexts
- Part IV Sexual and Gender Contexts
- Part V Political and Religious Contexts
- Part VI Biographical Contexts
- Chapter 23 Plath’s Journals
- Chapter 24 Plath’s Teaching and the Shaping of Her Work
- Chapter 25 Electroshock Therapy and Plath’s Convulsive Poetics
- Chapter 26 Plath’s Scrapbooks
- Chapter 27 Beyond Letters Home: Plath’s Unabridged Correspondence
- Part VII Plath and Place
- Part VIII The Creative Afterlife
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 23 - Plath’s Journals
from Part VI - Biographical Contexts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 August 2019
- Sylvia Plath in Context
- Sylvia Plath in Context
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Chronology
- Abbreviations and Textual Note
- Key Archives
- Introduction
- Part I Literary Contexts
- Part II Literary Technique and Influence
- Part III Cultural Contexts
- Part IV Sexual and Gender Contexts
- Part V Political and Religious Contexts
- Part VI Biographical Contexts
- Chapter 23 Plath’s Journals
- Chapter 24 Plath’s Teaching and the Shaping of Her Work
- Chapter 25 Electroshock Therapy and Plath’s Convulsive Poetics
- Chapter 26 Plath’s Scrapbooks
- Chapter 27 Beyond Letters Home: Plath’s Unabridged Correspondence
- Part VII Plath and Place
- Part VIII The Creative Afterlife
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Sally Bayley traces Plath’s emerging relationship to her journal persona and creed. Bayley focuses on the intense period of Plath’s late teenage years and early adulthood, including the beginnings of university education. She also reveals the importance of the diarists Plath read to Plath’s own journal activities and larger poetic practices. Of special importance is Virginia Woolf, and Bayley helps us to see afresh Plath’s off-quoted exhilaration at Woolf’s reference to cooking haddock and sausages, which says more about Plath herself than it does the subject of her comments. Bayley shows us how Plath’s ideas about the ‘melting’, emerging self, move from the journals and into poems such as ‘Ariel’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’.
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- Sylvia Plath in Context , pp. 245 - 254Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019
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