Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics

Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics explores the relationship between Plath's writing and Cold War discourses and argues that the time (1960-1963), the place (England), and the global politics are important factors for us to consider when we consider the rhetoric of Plath's later poetry and fiction. Based on fresh readings arising from new research, this study argues that Plath should not be depoliticized, and examines her writing alongside the discourses of the period as expressed in newspaper reporting, magazines, and BBC radio. In contrasting her relationship with institutions in America in the 1950s with her responses in England to church, the American arms industry, the National Health Service, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament it becomes clear that the process of cultural defamiliarization causes Plath to question the model of the individual artist divorced from society, a model of the writer that had previously seemed so attractive.