The international network SPAW (Sylvia Plath around the World) invites scholars to contribute to an international anthology about Sylvia Plath and translation from a global perspective. Scholarly texts, written in English, about a wide range of topics concerning Plath and translation, reception, adaptation and influence are welcome.
Sylvia Plath is a well-known and highly influential 20th century author, and her writing has paved the way for significant changes especially in women writers’ subject matter, literary forms, and techniques from the late 1960s onwards. Plath’s novel The Bell Jar (1963) is a modern classic, and the publication of her poetry collection Ariel (1965) is considered an important literary event in 20th century literary history. Describing Plath’s influence on American poetry, Linda Wagner-Martin claims that ”the results of the impact of Plath’s work are as pervasive as the influence of Ernest Hemingway’s terse yet open prose” (2006: 52), and depicting Plath’s effect on British poetry, Fiona Sampson has asserted that: ”Plath’s influence has passed into the vocabulary of the poetically possible: in English but potentially in the many languages into which she is translated” (2019: 357).
Plath’s influence has indeed transcended national and language borders. For example, Ivana Hostová has shown how Plath was translated into Slovak in the late 1980s, which influenced a number of prominent Slovak women poets in their writing and inspired numerous plays and poems being written of and about Plath. In a similar fashion, Jennifer Feeley has analyzed how different Plath translations impacted Chinese women’s poetry in the 1980s and 1990s resulting in “a bold new gendered poetics that marks a turning point in Chinese women’s writing” (Feeley, 2017: 38). Anna-Klara Bojö has shown that in Sweden, Plath was not received primarily as a feminist poet, but rather as a renewer of modernist lyricisms, and, taking a different angle on the subject of Plath in translation, Sofía Monzón Rodríguez has analyzed how the Francoist censorship board banned Plath’s texts on account of their sexually explicit and profane language.
Although Plath’s prose and poems have been translated into more than 30 languages, research concerning the translation and transmission processes, Plath's reception and influence stretching beyond English language borders is not readily available. We, the editors, therefore invite scholars around the world to contribute to an anthology concerning translation, reception and influence of Sylvia Plath in a global perspective.
We ask interested writers to submit an abstract (about 300 words) before September 15th, 2024.
Preliminary deadline for papers is May 1st, 2025.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, Sylvia Plath and:
· translation and retranslation
· post-translation
· reception
· influence
· literary history
· the literary market
· adaptation into other media, such as plays or music
· literary criticism
Please direct any questions you may have, and send your abstracts to: spaw.anthology@gmail.com
/The editors:
Anna-Klara Bojö
Sofía Monzón
Ivana Hostová
Anna-Klara Bojö, Gender Library and Archive at Gothenburgh University
Sofía Monzón, Utah State University
Ivana Hostová, Institute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences
