Product Description
This provocative book posits a new theory of women's writing characterized by what Claire Raymond calls 'the posthumous voice.' This suggestive term evokes the way that women's writing both forefronts and hides the author's implied body within and behind the written work. Tracing the use of the disembodied posthumous voice in fiction and poetry by Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath, Raymond's study sounds out the ways that the trope of the posthumous voice succeeds in negotiating the difficult cultural space between the concept of woman's body and the production of canonical literature. Arguing that the nineteenth-century cult of mourning opens to women's writing the possibility of a post-Romantic 'self-elegy,' Raymond explores how the woman writer's appropriation and alteration of elegiac conventions signifies and revises her disrupted relationship to audience. Theorizing the posthumous voice as a gesture by which the woman writer claims, and in some cases gains, canonicity, Raymond contends that the elegy posed as if written by a dead woman for herself both describes and subverts the woman writer's secondary status in the English canon.For the woman writer, the self-elegy permits access to a topos central to canonical literature, with the implementation of the trope of the posthumous voice marking a crucial site of woman's interaction with the English canon. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Hargrove, JOURNEY TOWARD ARIEL
Dianne Hunter's Review
Correcting Ted Hughes's chronology of Sylvia Plath's COLLECTED POEMS, Hargrove details close readings of the 1956-1959 succession of Plath's poetry, collated with her Letters Home, her pocket diary, THE BELL JAR, her short stories, and her Journals. Hargrove analyzes poem by poem, by groups of poems, and within a summary of these overall themes: the individual in a menacing world; male-female relations; the role of art and artists; the passage of time, decay, and death. This book has relevant illustrations, and displays admirable knowledge of Plath and Plath criticism. Hargrove favors "Hardcastle Crags" and "Moonrise." Of the former, she quotes Rosenthal & Gall: "'it is on its way to the discovery of how to write at a pitch of pure intensity that is like being carried away by, yet somehow guiding a runaway horse.'" ... Read more

Product Description
The first collection of contemprary reviews and essays on the work of Sylvia Plath. Includes more than eighty extracts, charting her reputation from 1960 to 1985. This book should be of interest to advanced students and lecturers in American literature and contemporary poetry. ... Read more

Product Description
Study of the works of Sylvia Plath, American poet. ... Read more

Product Description
A biography of the troubled woman whose literary achievements were cut short by her suicide at age thirty, interspersed with examples of her poetry.Amazon.com Review
Before committing suicide in 1963 at the age of 31, SylviaPlath wrote a bounty of work, including the final eight poems includedin this self-read collection--described by Robert Lowell as her"appalling and triumphant fulfillment." This later work, as well as 13additional recordings gathered here from Plath's short but significantcareer, are certainly triumphant: her prose is precise, scathing,utterly original, and mature beyond her years. Fortunately forlisteners, Plath's voice mirrors her writing. She delivers "LadyLazarus"--a piece about suicide, self-loathing, and her hatred formen--with a dagger-like cadence and clear, confident pitch. Shedescribes a suicide attempt:

It's easy enough to do it ina cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's thetheatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the sameface, the same brute

Customer Reviews (6)

Fascinating
A fascinating reading. I love the various nuances of her voice. It adds a new dimension to her poems, which are thrilling, interesting, and pleasant to the ear.

De profundis
There are poems here to warm your heart, and others to chill your blood.The 1957 poem "Sow" is a glorious celebration of the muddiness and bloodiness of thriving, procreating life, redolent of the optimistic romanticism of Wordsworth or Robert Graves.When we get to the later recordings, on side two, the poet's nerve ends are raw-exposed."Daddy", with its dark and terrible imagery - "Every woman adores a fascist, the boot in the face..." - makes you wonder exactly how her father, who died when she was a child, behaved toward her.That and "Lady Lazarus" are about as dark as poetry can get.Not every poet is the best reader of their work, but Plath conveys her agony in these recordings in a way that surely no one else could do.If you are prepared to probe the very centres of poetic pain, get this tape.

A Powerful Experience
This cassette is an amazing recording. Hearing Plath read her poems "Lady Lazarus" and "Ariel" is an experience beyond compare. Hearing the intonation of her voice leads one closer todiscovering another dimension to the poetry beyond that written on thepage. Her poems are works of art that are brought to a new plateau when sheinfuses her voice. They begin to stand in a new space, replicating themotion that her poem "Ariel" describes.

Audio intensifies relationship between poet and listener
This tape is amazing.From the moment I first read Plath's poetry, I longed to hear her read it herself.Her poetry is so extremely personal.The sound of her voice makes the poetry all the more powerful.This tape also allows the listener to hear the beauty of the words and the rhythm ofPlath's works.

Voice from the Dead
Listening to these recordings is a haunting experience. Plath recorded Side A when she was 25 and in the full blush of newlywed happiness. Like the rigidly structured poems of "The Colossus," Plath's deliveryof these earlier poems reflects a painstaking adherence to precision ofpronunciation and form. However, turn to Side B, recorded five years lateron October 30th, 1962--three days after her 30th birthday, three monthsbefore her suicide--and you are at once stunned by the harrowingtransformation in both Plath's voice and poetry. These are the"Ariel" poems, the poems that Plath herself declared to be"the best poems of my life; they will make my name." Here, it isclear that all hope and vitality has been sapped, and all that is left arethe charred remains of her former self--bruised and beaten, suffocating ina self-made grave of self-loathing and regret. Listen closely, and you canhear the faint murmuring of traffic outdoors, or the gentle shuffling ofpapers and creaking of wooden drawers. You are lost in her world, locked inher slow destruction. Sylvia Plath's pain bleeds from these recordings, andyou will not walk away from them unstained. ... Read more