"This is the first critical work to provide a full account of Sylvia Plath's intellectual biography. Using previously unexamined archive material to explore the diversities of influence in Plath's work, Al Strangeways offers a close reworking of Harold Bloom's Oedipal poetics of the literary canon, breaking open the model onto a recognition of the cultural and political forces through which Plath's poetry struggles into expression."--BOOK JACKET. "This timely book brings out for the first time the powerful interplay between Plath's poetic development and the writings of Thomas de Quincey, D.H. Lawrence, William Blake, and Emily Bronte, and establishes the crucial context of the often controversial use that she makes of politics, history, and myth in a post-Holocaust world."--BOOK JACKET