Breaking Down Plath (Jossey-Bass 2022)
Breaking Down Plath (Jossey-Bass 2022) is a guide to Sylvia Plath geared towards middle and high school students. The guide covers Plath’s biography, cultural and historical contexts, selected poems, fiction, essays, journals, letters, and legacy. With an eye towards demythologizing Plath and focusing on her achievements instead of her suicide, Breaking Down Plath aims to contextualize Plath’s work in the larger scheme of Cold War-era gender politics and anxiety about global nuclear conflict. Close readings of Plath’s work include a survey of critical interpretations as well as original analysis with a section on recurring and evolving themes.
Praise For Breaking Down Plath
"Patricia Grisafi's Breaking Down Plath is up to the moment. It blends historical and contemporary readings of Sylvia Plath—the major themes in her poetry and important aspects of her prose—in such a way that you, her newest readers, will understand and relate to the mid-twentieth century's most famous writer."
—Peter K. Steinberg
“Breaking Down Plath is a concise, effective, and highly accessible introduction to the work of Sylvia Plath. Skilfully drawing across Plath’s complete body of work, Grisafi places this important twentieth-century writer in her social and cultural context, but equally shows why she is still relevant today. Readers of this book will take away a strong flavor of Plath’s brilliance and undoubtedly want to read more.”
— Dr Gail Crowther author of Three-Martini Afternoons at The Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton
“Breaking Down Plath does for young fans of Plath what Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You has done for young people looking for a complex explanation of another distinctly American phenomenon. It's the kind of book I would have read and reread in junior high, grateful for a sympathetic depiction of someone who was already one of my heroes. Grisafi's savvy selection of Plath's poems gives us a rich context for a woman whose work has too-often been pathologized and misread, two trends Grisafi not only avoids, but reevaluates in whip-smart prose. I was amazed at the ground she covered in barely 100 pages. I loved this book.”
— Emily Van Duyne
“A dynamic guide through Sylvia Plath’s life, fiction, and poetry. Grisafi’s fresh take on Plathian themes like politics, mental health, and sexual violence prove time and time again that Sylvia Plath is not only relevant, but necessary.”
— Elizabeth Winder author of Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953
“Critically introducing Sylvia Plath to readers, Breaking Down Plath delivers the information and approaches that will prove necessary to student readers, who will discover Plath’s contributions to literature and who will be able to reflect upon her relevance and significance to culture, society, history, and the arts more generally. Grisafi foregrounds Plath’s brilliant artistry across genres and themes and provides the overviews, analyses, and discussions that guide students and readers in approaching and understanding Plath’s work and her life. This book is a much needed one: it enables developing readers of Plath and literature to hone their critical thinking and reflection skills as well as to study a writer whose work positions her as one of the foremost writers of the twentieth century and whose importance has never waned.”
— Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, Ph.D. IUPUI Chancellor’s Professor and IU Bicentennial Professor of English, affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Director of the Office of Student Research at Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus