PETALS: The Aestheticisation of Death in Sylvia Plath’s “Edge” and in the Illustrations of Adriaan van de Spiegel’s Frucht in Mutter Leibe

Estella Ciobanu

doi:10.2478/abcsj-2023-0006

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PETALS: The Aestheticisation of Death in Sylvia Plath’s “Edge” and in the Illustrations of Adriaan van de Spiegel’s Frucht in Mutter Leibe

American, British and Canadian Studies

Volume 40 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023)

By: Estella Ciobanu

Open Access

|Jan 2024

Abstract

This article investigates the aestheticisation of death in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Edge” in relation to other poems by her and marginally by Seamus Heaney and Charles Baudelaire, and to the short story “The Oval Portrait” by Edgar Allan Poe. Such aestheticisation, I contend, partakes of the spirit of the anatomical illustration of early modern tracts such as the joint volume by Giulio Casserio and Adriaan van de Spiegel, and of western culture’s necrophilia.

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Articles in this issue

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2023-0006 | Journal eISSN: 1841-964X | Journal ISSN: 1841-1487

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Language: English

Page range: 42 - 57

Published on: Jan 26, 2024

Published by: Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu

In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services

Publication frequency: 2 issues per year

Keywords:

Sylvia Plath,

“Edge”,

“The Munich Mannequins”,

“The Oval Portrait” (E. A. Poe),

perfection,

petals,

death,

aestheticisation,

anatomical illustration,

Adriaan van de Spiegel

Related subjects:

Literary studies,

Anglo-American literature,

Anglo-American literature, general,

Topics in literary studies,

Literary studies and linguistics

© 2024 Estella Ciobanu, published by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

Volume 40 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023)