New Light on Sylvia Plath: Tracy Brain's The Other Sylvia Plath and Tim Kendall's Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2+, University of Leipzig (Institut für Amerikanistik), course: HS American Women Poets, 18 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Sylvia Plath haunts our culture. She is—for many—a shadowy figure whose presence draws on and compels. What she may be asking for is never clear, although it seems highly unlikely that she is asking for what she gets. Execrated and idolised, Plath hovers between the furthest poles of positive and negative appraisal; she hovers in the space of what is most extreme, most violent, about appraisal, valuation, about moral and literary assessment as such. Above all she stirs things up. More than any other writer, perhaps, she lays bare the forms of psychic investment which lie, barely concealed, behind the processes through which a culture—Western literary culture— evaluates and perpetuates itself. (Rose 1) Sylvia Plath stirs things up. This holds true for both the general literary Western culture and the culture of literary intellectuals. Furthermore, it holds true not only for us today but also for the literary public before us. Since Sylvia Plath’s death, all kinds of people have discussed her life, her works and, and this is one of the sad facts, her suicide and its circumstances. The scars of the latter are still discernable at the gravestone of the poet. More than once, the name Hughes was scratched out of the stone’s epigraph: “In Memory / Sylvia Path Hughes / 1932 - 1963 / Even amidst fierce flames / the golden lotus can be planted”. The tracks of biographical research and literary criticism can be found in the libraries. Looking at them, one can see that the Plath discourse has changed over the years. Looking at the structure of the Plath discourse, this essay shall examine two recent publications in order to extract the differences to the more traditional approaches. Therefore, this essay shall start with an account of the established discourse, which will be categorised. Thereafter, the two novel books shall be introduced, and subsequently be classified according to the structure of the overall discussion. After having analysed some recent trends in detail, conclu- sions shall be drawn about the history of literary reception of Plath and the future works on her. [...]