Reclaiming Assia Wevill
Regular price
€44.99
Regular price
€47.99
Sale
Sale price
€44.99
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
20th century literary criticism
A01=Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick
automatic-update
Birthday Letters
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DC
Category=DSBH
Category=DSC
Category=JBSF
Category=JFSJ
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=0
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
eq_society-politics
feminism
gender politics
Language_English
PA=Available
poetry literary criticism
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
psychological trauma
softlaunch
suicide
transatlantic literary culture
trauma studies
Product details
- ISBN 9780807170564
- Weight: 439g
- Dimensions: 150 x 222mm
- Publication Date: 09 Oct 2019
- Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination reconsiders cultural representations of Assia Wevill (1927- 1969), according her a more significant position than a femme fatale or scapegoat for marital discord and suicide in the lives and works of two major twentieth-century poets.
Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick's innovative study combines feminist recovery work with discussions of the power and gendered dynamics that shape literary history. She focuses on how Wevill figures into poems by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, showing that they often portrayed her in harsh, conflicted, even demeaning terms. Their representations of Wevill established condemnatory narratives that were perpetuated by subsequent critics and biographers and in works of popular culture. In Plath's literary treatments, Goodspeed-Chadwick locates depictions of both desirable and undesirable femininity, conveyed in images of female bodies as beautiful but barren or as vehicles for dangerous, destructive acts. By contrast, Hughes's portrayals illustrate the role Wevill occupied in his life as muse and abject object. His late work Capriccio constitutes a sustained meditation on trauma, in which Hughes confronts Wevill's suicide and her killing of their daughter, Shura.
Goodspeed-Chadwick also analyzes Wevill's self-representations by examining artifacts that she authored or on which she collaborated. Finally, she discusses portrayals of Wevill in recent works of literature, film, and television. In the end, Goodspeed-Chadwick shows that Wevill remains an object of both fascination and anger, as she was for Plath, and a figure of attraction and repulsion, as she was for Hughes.
Reclaiming Assia Wevill reconsiders its subject's tragic life and lasting impact in regard to perceived gender roles and notions of femininity, power dynamics in heterosexual relationships, and the ways in which psychological traumas impact life, art, and literary imagination.
Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick's innovative study combines feminist recovery work with discussions of the power and gendered dynamics that shape literary history. She focuses on how Wevill figures into poems by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, showing that they often portrayed her in harsh, conflicted, even demeaning terms. Their representations of Wevill established condemnatory narratives that were perpetuated by subsequent critics and biographers and in works of popular culture. In Plath's literary treatments, Goodspeed-Chadwick locates depictions of both desirable and undesirable femininity, conveyed in images of female bodies as beautiful but barren or as vehicles for dangerous, destructive acts. By contrast, Hughes's portrayals illustrate the role Wevill occupied in his life as muse and abject object. His late work Capriccio constitutes a sustained meditation on trauma, in which Hughes confronts Wevill's suicide and her killing of their daughter, Shura.
Goodspeed-Chadwick also analyzes Wevill's self-representations by examining artifacts that she authored or on which she collaborated. Finally, she discusses portrayals of Wevill in recent works of literature, film, and television. In the end, Goodspeed-Chadwick shows that Wevill remains an object of both fascination and anger, as she was for Plath, and a figure of attraction and repulsion, as she was for Hughes.
Reclaiming Assia Wevill reconsiders its subject's tragic life and lasting impact in regard to perceived gender roles and notions of femininity, power dynamics in heterosexual relationships, and the ways in which psychological traumas impact life, art, and literary imagination.
Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick is professor of English and an affiliate faculty member in women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Indiana University- Purdue University Columbus. She is the author of Modernist Women Writers and War: Trauma and the Female Body in Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein.
