Description

The history of Plath's reception as a writer has been one of displacements. Biographical speculation, and the controversy surrounding the posthumous publication of her work, have dominated critical debate at the expense of her poetic and fictional achievement. Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning offers a new framework of interpretation for the texts, which attends to their formal complexity without detaching them either from their historical moment or from contemporary debates about language, gender and subjectivity. Interweaving close reading and theoretical reflection, Britzolakis argues that Plath's poetry constitutes a psychic theatre which makes the work of mourning inseparable from its performance in language, and shows how she engaged with the legacy of modernism to arrive at this distinctive mode.