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Ekphrasis in “The Disquieting Muses”: A Dialogue Between Poetry and Painting

Yupan Luo

Abstract


The American Confessional poet Sylvia Plath(1932-1963) has created a series of poems based on well-known western paintings at the early ages of her writing. “The Disquieting Muses” is one of these ekphrastic poems, which depicts the non-communicative relationship between her and her natural mother. If we approach this poem from the perspective of inter-arts poetics, that is to say, to analyze the poem side by side with its painting copy, we can discover different approaches of dialogue between the poem and the painting. This paper is meant to explore unique charm and beauty in ekphrastic literature as well as to add new perspectives to the study of Plath’s poems.


Keywords


“The Disquieting Muses”; Sylvia Plath; Giorgio de Chirico; Ekphrasis; Dialogue

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References


Bloom, Harold. Sylvia Plath: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide. Broomall: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001.

Friedenthal R. Letters of the Great Artists-from Ghiberti to Gainsborough. London: Thames and Hudson, 1963.

Heffernan JAW. “ Ekphrasis and Representation. ” New Literary History 22.2 (1991): 297-316.

Mitchell WJT. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.

Plath S. Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950-1963. Aurelia Schober Plath, ed. New York: Harper Perennial, 1981. The collected poems. Ted Hughes,ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1981.

Wang A, Cheng XL. “Ekphrasis: A Keyword in Critical Theory.” Foreign Literature Review 4(2016): 77-87.

Zeng W. “Sylvia Plath’s Poem and Giorgio de Chirico’s Painting.” Hubei Institute of Fine Arts Journal 3(2018): 4-11.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18686/ahe.v6i10.5610

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