Includes bibliographical references (pages 307-309) and index.

Career, life, and influence : On Sylvia Plath / William K. Buckley ; Biography of Sylvia Plath / Peter K. Steinberg -- Crtical contexts : Historical and cultural background for Sylvia Plath's poems / Lynda K. Bundtzen ; The current critical reception of Sylvia Plath / Peter K. Steinberg ; Story, body, and voice: dating and grouping Sylvia Plath's poems / Tracy Brain -- Critical readings : Thinking back through our mothers: Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and contemporary women's poetry / Diann Blakely ; "A red-blooded American girl": gender, American culture, and Sylvia Plath / Jessica McCort ; Teaching Plath today / Helen Decker ; Sylvia Plath: an American poet / Teresa Marie Laye ; The murkiness of The bell jar: questions of genre and depression / Melissa Adamo ; "Herr Lucifer" to Satan's words to father as God: the poetry of Sharon Olds and Sylvia Plath / Renee Burch ; "Fifteen years between me and the bay": haunting places and the poems of Sylvia Plath / Gail Crowther ; Odd notes of a Plath archivist / Kathleen Connors ; Terms of art: Plath, the medical lexicon, and the human body in health and disease / Ralph Didlake ; That still, blue, almost eternal hour: touching the sacred and the profane in Sylvia Plath's last poems / Cheryl A. Hemmerle.