عنوان

Bible of Dreams :

Number

TLets392167

Title Proper

Bible of Dreams :

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Tovey, Julie Anne.

Title Proper by Another Author

the cultural work of Sylvia Plath's short fiction.

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

Birkbeck (University of London)

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2000

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

Birkbeck (University of London)

Text preceding or following the note

2000

Text of Note

Sylvia Plath has become the poetic icon of a post-war, Anglo-American literary culture.Yet her short stories are persistently read as semi-autobiographical, or in the context ofher poetry, and have so far remained deprived of close critical attention as a collectionof work. This thesis argues that the marginalisation of Plath's short stories is the resultof a high-cultural agenda to privilege her work as a poet, and considers the impact ofBirthday Letters and its role in this context. It suggests that this reading of Plath's workreplays the most oppressive aspects of her culture, which she sought to challenge in hershort stories. It also aims to redress this marginalisation, reading her stories against thecultural context within which they were written: the popular psychological andsociological texts, films and comic strip super-heroes which simultaneously influencedand defined the period. In asserting the social, historical and political significance ofPlath's writing it argues that, whilst working within popular fictional forms and genericconventions, Plath's textual strategies - including irony and parody - enable hernarratives to enact these conventions excessively, challenging the manifest content andresolution.The thesis asserts that Plath's short stories expose the political investment in culturallyconstructed images of a passive, domestic femininity as a means of ensuring socialstability and political conformity at the beginning of the Cold War. Her writing exploresthe effects upon women of living within a highly gendered culture and the consequencesof the cultural imperative to approximate images of femininity which had beenculturally constructed. However, the thesis argues that, in the interplay between themanifest and latent content of the texts, Plath's stories disruptively reveal that which hasproved most disturbing and threatening to patriarchal culture, marking the return of thatwhich has been culturally repressed.

Tovey, Julie Anne.

Birkbeck (University of London)

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y