Exemplary Sufferer : Daughterhood, Wifehood, Motherhood in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath

dc.contributor.advisorSandwith, Corinne
dc.contributor.coadvisorWessels, J.A. (Andries)
dc.contributor.emailgeorg.noffke@up.ac.zaen_ZA
dc.contributor.postgraduateNöffke, Tobias Georg
dc.date.accessioned2021-07-13T10:42:57Z
dc.date.available2021-07-13T10:42:57Z
dc.date.created2021-09-01
dc.date.issued2021
dc.descriptionThesis (PhD (English))--University of Pretoria, 2021.en_ZA
dc.description.abstractBy examining critically poems in which Sylvia Plath’s speakers appear as daughters, wives, and mothers, this study situates Plath as an artist operating within Romantic and Modernist traditions of exemplary suffering. The thesis offers, on the one hand, a line of inquiry that accounts in part for the nature of the enduring Romantic interest in Plath, the synonymy of her cultural iconicity with pain or struggle, the way she has been read as an exemplary sufferer. On the other, it indicates Plath’s own self-conscious involvement in the Romantic tradition, the way she participates in and complicates that lineage by imbuing it with Modernist, feminist concerns. The thesis thus clarifies some vital, historico-artistic dimensions of Plath’s position as artistic sufferer (what qualifies it as exemplary), and scrutinizes the workings of suffering within the selected poems, the specifics of Plath’s exemplarity. Three thematic banners spanning across the poetic body of work are demarcated: representations of the daughter, representations of the wife, representations of the mother. All three denote major sites of conflict (agons), sites of struggle. They make for volatile, generative, provocative loci showing poetic engagements with suffering; as such, they highlight the gendered nature of the preoccupation. These categories are investigated as evolving narratives, trajectories that can be traced from the early stages of Plath’s poetic career right up until its end. Within each category special attention, in the form of a close reading, is given to select poems regarded as emblematic of a particular facet in the unfurling narrative. The study maps out and evaluates the manifestations, forms, and functions of a suffering whose genesis lies in prominent literary-historical traditions.en_ZA
dc.description.availabilityRestricteden_ZA
dc.description.degreePhD (English)en_ZA
dc.description.departmentEnglishen_ZA
dc.identifier.citation*en_ZA
dc.identifier.otherS2021en_ZA
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/2263/80803
dc.language.isoenen_ZA
dc.publisherUniversity of Pretoria
dc.rights© 2019 University of Pretoria. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of Pretoria. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the University of Pretoria.
dc.subjectUCTDen_ZA
dc.subjectEnglishen_ZA
dc.subjectSylvia Plath
dc.subjectexemplary suffering
dc.subjectRomanticism
dc.subjectModernism
dc.subjectmotherhood
dc.titleExemplary Sufferer : Daughterhood, Wifehood, Motherhood in the Poetry of Sylvia Plathen_ZA
dc.typeThesisen_ZA

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