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Out of the Ash Sylvia Plath

• HUM 2213 British and American Literature II
• Spring 2015
• Dr. Perdigao
• March 16, 2015

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(No Transcript)
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Nine Female Figures
Two Women Reading
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From Modern to Contemporary

• literary hegemony of the fifties (Breslin 59)
• Contemporary poems contain cracks, even
  fissures they are heterogeneous. If they include
  disjunctions, interruptions, digressions, it is
  to show how they remain open, in process, rather
  than creating a perfectly ordered enclosure
  (Breslin 61).
• Ideas of regeneration
• Confessional poetry as mythologizing of the
  self, Plaths transformation into The fine,
  white flying myth of Ariel (Breslin 104)

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Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

• Parents Otto and Aurelia Schoeber Plath father
  taught German and zoology at Boston University
  died when she was eight
• Aurelia moved family to Wellesley to teach at
  Boston University
• Published poetry, fiction, and journalism before
  attending Smith College (Heath E 2836)
• English major
• Depression, breakdown in 1953 after serving as
  Mademoiselle College Board editor
  electroconvulsive shock treatments led to suicide
  attempt that summer psychiatric care before
  returning to Smith
• June 1955 graduated summa cum laude M.A. on
  Fulbright Fellowship at Cambridge, England
• Married Ted Hughes, later Poet Laureate of
  England, on June 16, 1956
• 1957 returned to the states Plath taught at
  Smith

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Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

• Lived in Boston for a year, returned to England
  in 1959
• Published The Colossus and Other Poems (1960),
  The Bell Jar (1963), Ariel (1965) The Collected
  Poems (1981), The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)
• Collected Poems won Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in
  1982
• Had two children separated from Hughes
• Committed suicide in her flat, Yeats house in
  London, after The Bell Jar was published
• Ariel contained last poems
• Late poems as most well received final poems
  with change in tone