By Gail Crowther & Peter K. Steinberg

We are pleased to announce that we have just signed a book contract with Fonthill Media for a co-authored publication, the working title of which is, These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath. The essays in the book are based on our ‘These Ghostly Archives’ series of papers which we published from 2009-2013. We have substantially revised several of the essays and written new conversational pieces, in addition to producing original solo chapters. We are contracted to submit the manuscript to Fonthill this summer and anticipate a 2017 release.

The topics in the book will cover a plethora of Plath finds in the archives, but will also reflect more generally on the experiential nature of working in archives, and how these spaces may be understood. We have become increasingly interested not only in the way power informs archives, but how archives are, rather paradoxically, quite fluid things – not just fixed repositories holding relics from the past.

We discuss tracking and tracing lost manuscripts and poems, finding new work in the most unexpected of places, the contrast between Plath’s professional and personal holdings, her hair and her clothes, and the largely ignored poetry anthology that Plath worked on throughout 1961 as she was concurrently editing The Bell Jar. These archival adventures occur on both sides of the Atlantic, and take us into a number of well known and lesser known archives.

We definitely have Derridean archive fever and we hope you will too!

[For other recent Plath finds and information visit Peter’s website and blog for Plath: www.sylviaplath.info and www.sylviaplathinfo.blogspot.com.]