Focusing on previously unpublished material found in archives from all around the world, ‘These Ghostly Archives’ aims to reconstruct the ghostly figure of Plath within our culture via unseen letters, manuscripts, photographs, places, and poems. This book approaches archival studies by exploring both the practical and experiential work carried out in the archive, highlighting the ‘detective’ type work that it involves and the traces left behind from history. However, for the first time, this book also combines the sociological notion of ‘haunting’-that is, the archive as a location where both the researchers haunt the research subject, and in turn are haunted by the traces left behind. Never is material culture more powerful than when associated with the dead. Never is an archive more ghostly than when it is haunted by the absent presence of Plath. This book showcases the necessity to leave no archival box or folder left unopened, and how the researcher and the archive can change, even though its documents might stay the same. ‘These Ghostly Archives’ offers a ground-breaking and unique look at Sylvia Plath studies.
