San Antonio College Library

Few modern poets have generated as much controversy as Sylvia Plath. In the aftermath of her suicide in 1963 at the age of thirty, Plath's popularity and stature have steadily increased due to her powerful, self-revelatory imagery and her unflinching stare into the abyss of the human soul. "Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness" masterfully explores the paradoxes of this fascinating woman: the overachieving daughter desperate for approval, the tormented...

"This study examines the presentation of madness in the major plays by Tennessee Williams, and demonstrates the ways that Williams's preoccupation with the mentally ill and society's treatment of them were explored through his drama. Thematic chapter groupings divide the analysis into discussions of confinement, language, women, and the artist. The critical approach is eclectic and the author draws on a variety of psychological, literary, and biographical...

The author contends psychobiography has much to gain from a closer engagement with science. Literary studies of Woolf's life have been written almost exclusively from a psychoanalytic perspective. They portray Woolf as a victim of the Freudian "family romance," reducing her art to a neurotic evasion of a traumatic childhood. But current knowledge about manic-depressive illness--its genetic transmission, its biochemistry, and its effect on brain function--reveals...

For students of the psychology and medicine of the Augustan age as well as to those interested in ist literature.