"The same anew" : James Joyce's modernism and its influence on Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar

Beginning in the late 1970s and increasing from the 1990s on, critics have worked to relate Sylvia Plath’s poetry and prose to various literary contexts ranging across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Modernism has been an increasingly prominent focus in this work: in 1979, Gary Lane and Barnett Guttenberg assessed Plath’s poetic relation to the Irish modernist W. B. Yeats, and in 1986 Linda W. Wagner related The Bell Jar to the bildungsroman tradition, especially its modernist instantiation. In 1998, Al Strangeways applied Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence to Plath’s poetry, tracing intertextual allusion to Victorian, modernist, and mid-century writing. In the current century, Tracy Brain has related The Bell Jar to Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf, and Luke Ferretter has related Plath’s prose to modernism and mid-century periodical culture.