Download or read book Breaking Down Plath written by Patricia Grisafi and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-02-02 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A practical guide to Sylvia Plath’s works for middle and secondary school students One of the most dynamic and admired poets of the 20th century, Sylvia Plath wrote work about war, motherhood, jealousy, rage, grief, death, and mental illness that challenged preconceptions about what poetry should be about. The enduring power of Plath’s poetry and prose continues to attract and fascinate a multitude of readers. Best known for her poems "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" and the novel The Bell Jar, Plath starkly expressed a sense of alienation closely linked to both her personal experiences and the to the wider situation of women throughout mid-twentieth-century America. With an eye towards demythologizing Plath and focusing on her achievements, Breaking Down Plath aims to contextualize Plath’s work in the larger scheme of Cold War-era gender politics, debates about mental health, and anxiety about global conflict. Breaking Down Plath informs readers of essential facts about Sylvia Plath’s life and explores the works of the influential and controversial American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Author Patricia Grisafi contextualizes and clarifies important underlying themes in Plath’s works while providing insight into how interest in Plath’s work developed, how the story of Plath’s life has been told, what we still need to discover about her, and why her life and art matter. Breaking Down Plath: Presents a critical biography of Plath’s life Offers a thematic tour through Plath's, short fiction, journals, and letters Explores the recurrent themes in Plath’s poetry Features an overview of the reception of Plath’s work Discusses the role of Plath in contemporary popular culture This book is a primer for younger or new Plath readers and a welcome addition to the toolbox used by educators, parents, and anyone interested in or studying Plath’s life and work.
Download or read book Pain Parties Work written by Elizabeth Winder and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I dreamed of New York, I am going there." On May 31, 1953, twenty-year-old Sylvia Plath arrived in New York City for a one-month stint at "the intellectual fashion magazine" Mademoiselle to be a guest editor for its prestigious annual college issue. Over the next twenty-six days, the bright, blond New England collegian lived at the Barbizon Hotel, attended Balanchine ballets, watched a game at Yankee Stadium, and danced at the West Side Tennis Club. She typed rejection letters to writers from The New Yorker and ate an entire bowl of caviar at an advertising luncheon. She stalked Dylan Thomas and fought off an aggressive diamond-wielding delegate from the United Nations. She took hot baths, had her hair done, and discovered her signature drink (vodka, no ice). Young, beautiful, and on the cusp of an advantageous career, she was supposed to be having the time of her life. Drawing on in-depth interviews with fellow guest editors whose memories infuse these pages, Elizabeth Winder reveals how these twenty-six days indelibly altered how Plath saw herself, her mother, her friendships, and her romantic relationships, and how this period shaped her emerging identity as a woman and as a writer. Pain, Parties, Work—the three words Plath used to describe that time—shows how Manhattan's alien atmosphere unleashed an anxiety that would stay with her for the rest of her all-too-short life. Thoughtful and illuminating, this captivating portrait invites us to see Sylvia Plath before The Bell Jar, before she became an icon—a young woman with everything to live for.
Download or read book The Last Days of Sylvia Plath written by Carl Rollyson and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her last days, Sylvia Plath struggled to break out from the control of the towering figure of her husband Ted Hughes. In the antique mythology of his retinue, she had become the gorgon threatening to bring down the House of Hughes. Drawing on recently available court records, archives, and interviews, and reevaluating the memoirs of the formidable Hughes contingent who treated Plath as a female hysteric, Carl Rollyson rehabilitates the image of a woman too often viewed solely within the confines of what Hughes and his collaborators wanted to be written. Rollyson is the first biographer to gain access to the papers of Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse at Smith College, a key figure in the poet’s final days. Barnhouse was a therapist who may have been the only person to whom Plath believed she could reveal her whole self. Barnhouse went beyond the protocols of her profession, serving more as Plath’s ally, seeking a way out of the imprisoning charisma of Ted Hughes and friends he counted on to support a regime of antipathy against her. The Last Days of Sylvia Plath focuses on the train of events that plagued Plath’s last seven months when she tried to recover her own life in the midst of Hughes’s alternating threats and reassurances. In a siege-like atmosphere a tormented Plath continued to write, reach out to friends, and care for her two children. Why Barnhouse seemed, in Hughes’s malign view, his wife’s undoing, and how biographers, Hughes, and his cohort parsed the events that led to the poet’s death, form the charged and contentious story this book has to tell.
Download or read book Break Blow Burn written by Camille Paglia and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America’s most provocative intellectual brings her blazing powers of analysis to the most famous poems of the Western tradition—and unearths some previously obscure verses worthy of a place in our canon. Combining close reading with a panoramic breadth of learning, Camille Paglia sharpens our understanding of poems we thought we knew, from Shakespeare to Dickinson to Plath, and makes a case for including in the canon works by Paul Blackburn, Wanda Coleman, Chuck Wachtel, Rochelle Kraut—and even Joni Mitchell. Daring, riveting, and beautifully written, Break, Blow, Burn is a modern classic that excites even seasoned poetry lovers—and continues to create generations of new ones.
Download or read book Ariel The Restored Edition written by Sylvia Plath and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2005-10-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sylvia Plath's famous collection, as she intended it. When Sylvia Plath died, she not only left behind a prolific life but also her unpublished literary masterpiece, Ariel. When her husband, Ted Hughes, first brought this collection to life, it garnered worldwide acclaim, though it wasn't the draft Sylvia had wanted her readers to see. This facsimile edition restores, for the first time, Plath's original manuscript -- including handwritten notes -- and her own selection and arrangement of poems. This edition also includes in facsimile the complete working drafts of her poem "Ariel," which provide a rare glimpse into the creative process of a beloved writer. This publication introduces a truer version of Plath's works, and will no doubt alter her legacy forever. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
Download or read book Ted Hughes written by Jonathan Bate and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He was one of Britain’s most important poets. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, he was also a prolific children’s writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letterwriter since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. His lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, is the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry. Hughes left behind a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems, and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes’s inner life, which he preserved for posterity. Renowned scholar Jonathan Bate has spent five years in the Hughes archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers, for the first time, the full story of Hughes’s life as it was lived, remembered, and reshaped in his art.
Download or read book Three Martini Afternoons at the Ritz written by Gail Crowther and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A dual biography of poets, friends, and rivals Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton"--
Download or read book Zoo Time written by Howard Jacobson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new novel from the author of "The Finkler Question," winner of the Man Booker Prize 2010
Download or read book Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume II written by Sylvia Plath and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 936 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was one of the writers that defined the course of twentieth-century poetry. Her vivid, daring and complex poetry continues to captivate new generations of readers and writers. In the Letters, we discover the art of Plath's correspondence. Most has never before been published, and it is here presented unabridged, without revision, so that she speaks directly in her own words. Refreshingly candid and offering intimate details of her personal life, Plath is playful, too, entertaining a wide range of addressees, including family, friends and professional contacts, with inimitable wit and verve. The letters document Plath's extraordinary literary development: the genesis of many poems, short and long fiction, and journalism. Her endeavour to publish in a variety of genres had mixed receptions, but she was never dissuaded. Through acceptance of her work, and rejection, Plath strove to stay true to her creative vision. Well-read and curious, she simultaneously offers a fascinating commentary on contemporary culture. Leading Plath scholar Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, editor of The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962, provide comprehensive footnotes and an extensive index informed by their meticulous research. Alongside a selection of photographs and Plath's own drawings, they masterfully contextualise what the pages disclose. This selection of later correspondence witnesses Plath and Hughes becoming major, influential contemporary writers, as it happened. Experiences recorded include first books and other publications; teaching; committing to writing full-time; travels; making professional acquaintances; settling in England; building a family; and buying a house. Throughout, Plath's voice is completely, uniquely her own.
Download or read book Red Comet written by Heather Clark and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 1185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • The highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art. “One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read." —Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller, Untamed With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials, Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant Sylvia Plath, who had precocious poetic ambition and was an accomplished published writer even before she became a star at Smith College. Refusing to read Plath’s work as if her every act was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark considers the sociopolitical context as she thoroughly explores Plath’s world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her troubles with an unenlightened mental health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes; and much more. Clark’s clear-eyed portraits of Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath’s suicide promote a deeper understanding of her final days. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark’s meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over.
Download or read book The Silent Woman written by Janet Malcolm and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-01-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an astonishing feat of literary detection, one of the most provocative critics of our time and the author of In the Freud Archives and The Purloined Clinic offers an elegantly reasoned meditation on the art of biography. In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm examines the biographies of Sylvia Plath to create a book not about Plath’s life but about her afterlife: how her estranged husband, the poet Ted Hughes, as executor of her estate, tried to serve two masters—Plath’s art and his own need for privacy; and how it fell to his sister, Olwyn Hughes, as literary agent for the estate, to protect him by limiting access to Plath’s work. Even as Malcolm brings her skepticism to bear on the claims of biography to present the truth about a life, a portrait of Sylvia Plath emerges that gives us a sense of “knowing” this tragic poet in a way we have never known her before. And she dispels forever the innocence with which most of us have approached the reading of any biography.
Download or read book Your Own Sylvia written by Stephanie Hemphill and published by Knopf Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a bleak February day in 1963 a young American poet died by her own hand, and passed into a myth that has since imprinted itself on the hearts and minds of millions. She was and is Sylvia Plath and Your Own, Sylvia is a portrait of her life, told in poems. With photos and an extensive list of facts and sources to round out the reading experience, Your Own, Sylvia is a great curriculum companion to Plath's The Bell Jar and Ariel, a welcoming introduction for newcomers, and an unflinching valentine for the devoted.
Download or read book The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1 written by Sylvia Plath and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 1424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major literary event: the first volume in the definitive, complete collection of the letters of Sylvia Plath—most never before seen. One of the most beloved poets of the modern age, Sylvia Plath continues to inspire and fascinate the literary world. While her renown as one of the twentieth century’s most influential poets is beyond dispute, Plath was also one of its most captivating correspondents. The Letters of Sylvia Plath is the breathtaking compendium of this prolific writer’s correspondence with more than 120 people, including family, friends, contemporaries, and colleagues. The Letters of Sylvia Plath includes her correspondence from her years at Smith, her summer editorial internship in New York City, her time at Cambridge, her experiences touring Europe, and the early days of her marriage to Ted Hughes in 1956. Most of the letters are previously unseen, including sixteen letters written by Plath to Hughes when they were apart after their honeymoon. This magnificent compendium also includes twenty-seven of Plath’s own elegant line drawings taken from the letters she sent to her friends and family, as well as twenty-two previously unpublished photographs. This remarkable, collected edition of Plath’s letters is a work of immense scholarship and care, presenting a comprehensive and historically accurate text of the known and extant letters that she wrote. Intimate and revealing, this masterful compilation offers fans and scholars generous and unprecedented insight into the life of one of our most significant poets.
Download or read book Sylvia Plath written by Susan Bassnett and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-16 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sylvia Plath is one of the best-known and most widely-studied writers of the twentieth century. Since her death in 1963, critics have presented different images of Plath: the 'suicidal' poet, the frustrated wife and mother, the feminist precursor. In this lively and approachable introduction to the author's poetry, Susan Bassnett offers a balanced view of Plath as one of the finest contemporary poets, and shows the diversity of her work. Bassnett's refreshing perspective on the writer provides a welcome alternative to the many studies which attempt endlessly to psychoanalyse Plath posthumously. Bassnett argues that there can never be any definitive version of the Plath story, but, from close readings of her texts, readers can discover the excitement of her diverse work. Plath is not viewed as an author driven by a death wish, nor does the book focus on her suicide - instead, she is considered in the cultural context in which she wrote, and viewed as a complex writer. Now thoroughly revised and expanded in the light of recent research, the second edition of this essential text contains new chapters and more close reading of the poetry. It concludes with an analysis of Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters, a collection of poems which he wrote about his wife after her death.
Download or read book The Journals of Sylvia Plath written by Sylvia Plath and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2013-01-16 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The electrifying diaries that are essential reading for anyone moved and fascinated by the life and work of one of America's most acclaimed poets. Sylvia Plath began keeping a diary as a young child. By the time she was at Smith College, when this book begins, she had settled into a nearly daily routine with her journal, which was also a sourcebook for her writing. Plath once called her journal her “Sargasso,” her repository of imagination, “a litany of dreams, directives, and imperatives,” and in fact these pages contain the germs of most of her work. Plath’s ambitions as a writer were urgent and ultimately all-consuming, requiring of her a heat, a fantastic chaos, even a violence that burned straight through her. The intensity of this struggle is rendered in her journal with an unsparing clarity, revealing both the frequent desperation of her situation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons.
Download or read book Mary Ventura and The Ninth Kingdom written by Sylvia Plath and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Plath’s] story is stirring, in sneaky, unexpected ways. . . . Look carefully and there’s a new angle here — on how, and why, we read Plath today.”— Parul Sehgal, New York Times Never before published, this newly discovered story by literary legend Sylvia Plath stands on its own and is remarkable for its symbolic, allegorical approach to a young woman’s rebellion against convention and forceful taking control of her own life. Written while Sylvia Plath was a student at Smith College in 1952, Mary Ventura and The Ninth Kingdom tells the story of a young woman’s fateful train journey. Lips the color of blood, the sun an unprecedented orange, train wheels that sound like “guilt, and guilt, and guilt”: these are just some of the things Mary Ventura begins to notice on her journey to the ninth kingdom. “But what is the ninth kingdom?” she asks a kind-seeming lady in her carriage. “It is the kingdom of the frozen will,” comes the reply. “There is no going back.” Sylvia Plath’s strange, dark tale of female agency and independence, written not long after she herself left home, grapples with mortality in motion.
Download or read book Sylvia Plath Reads written by Sylvia Plath and published by HarperAu. This book was released on 1992-02-14 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Plath's voice is lucid and precise, and the poetry is deeply intense in its reading and mood. The words combined with the voice render stunning images of the inner self and the creative energy of Sylvia Plath." BooklistIncludes: Leaving Early * Mushrooms * The Surgeon at Two A.M. * The Disquieting Muses * Spinster * November Graveyard * A Plethora of Dyrads * The Lady and the Earthenware Head * On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad * On the Decline of Oracles * The Goring * Ouija * Sculptor.
