Sylvia Plath's Hidden Civil Rights Messages

Plath Profiles an Interdisciplinary Journal For Sylvia Plath Studies, 2012

International Journal of Aquatic Science ISSN:2008-8019, 2021

Very few things in literary history have created an impact that has been associated with the suicide of Sylvia Plath. The sad circumstances that have preceded and followed her death have made it even more sinister and intriguing and their shadows have cast a huge veil of uncertainty and darkness which have within no time created a literary and cultural polarization. It also side-lined the modern poetry movement which was just picking up its lost reins after the second world war. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes should have played a major role in such a revival. On the other hand, a whole generation of literary critics, writers, biographers, and social enthusiasts have focussed more than due attention to biographical details that do not contribute much to literary biography. They were engaged in a battle to establish or bring to light the gross injustice that has been perpetrated against an innocent girl trapped in a wedlock.

Plath Profiles an Interdisciplinary Journal For Sylvia Plath Studies, 2008

This preface is dedicated to the memory of Senator William Fulbright, and to the work of his wife Harriett Fulbright, whose program to send American scholars off to study and teach and learn is based on the idea that a practical plan for world peace can be accomplished for less than the price of one third of one wing of one bomber plane. The goal: "bringing different kinds of people, learning side by side, to build what he called 'a capacity for empathy, a distaste for killing other men, and an inclination for peace'." The program to send scholars, not bombs, in an effort to promote increased understanding among peoples, is one reason why Sylvia Plath commands the interest today from a growing international scholarly community, and which has led to my own transformed conception of the world and my vision of what is at stake in all of our work on the role of arts and humanities in civic culture. Fulbright's sending "know-it-all" Americans abroad makes us fish out of water, discovering ourselves new and strange and changedhumbled but more interested and interesting. Sylvia Plath's 1956 Fulbright to Cambridge, and her experience in the British literary and academic world, changed in profound ways her iconic "All-American Girl" life, and, in a quantum domino effect, has impacted the energies and commitments of each scholar interested in her work. I would argue that without this Fulbright experience, Plath would not have developed the worldview that makes her poetry deeper, more complex, and perhaps more insightful not only about others but about herself in a global and historical context. She is consequently of more significant interest not only from a strictly literary perspective but in terms of cultural history.

ESC: English Studies in Canada, 2011

Textual Practice, 2006

Sylvia Plath occupies an icon-generative presence in American literary imagination. She is one of the few American poets whose poems span across cultures. Her works continue to inspire, fascinate and resonate with readers across borders and generations even too, after death. She was born and brought up in America. She had an innate fascination for things when she was growing up in the east of America; but as she matured she gave up rigid provincialism and narrow human bias. Her poems became as expansive as her own country and embraced in their multiplicity not only her anxieties and concerns, but also the cultural profile of the age in which she was living. The poetic vision in a way was dictated by her unsettling drifting mind which knew no boundaries.

2018

Increased interest in psychobiographical research has resulted in national and international researchers advocating its value. Although South Africa has seen an increase in the number of psychobiographies based on individuals who have made important contributions, both nationally and internationally, the majority of these psychobiographies have focused on male research subjects. In light of South Africa’s efforts to promote female empowerment in a postapartheid era, South African psychologists may be motivated to embark on the study of significant and exceptional women who shaped history, whether in South Africa or abroad. Sylvia Plath has been hailed as one of the most influential and renowned figures of the 20 century. Although she only published one poetry collection (The Colossus) and one novel (The Bell Jar) in her lifetime, the many poems, short stories, letters and journal entries which were published after her death, have secured her status as a powerful voice in Anglo-Ameri...

Analele Universităţii de Vest din Timişoara. Seria ştiinţe filologice, 2024

For almost four decades after she died, Sylvia Plath's executors (The Sylvia Plath Estate) carefully guarded biographical details concerning the circumstances of the writer's final months of life. As generations passed and archives opened, Plath scholarship was enriched with new perspectives feeding on new materials and documents. I shall explore the impact of archival elements on the constant revising and rewriting of Sylvia Plath's biography, while also discussing the relevance of the unpublished manuscripts of some biographers. Despite their long and thorough documentation, they abandoned their projects, leaving, in sealed archives now open, massive amounts of research materials that can now be reevaluated.

Plath Profiles: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Sylvia Plath Studies, 2014