Map of Reading and Re-reading: Many Voices, Female Voices, Plath’s Voices

Pointing towards the variety of possible interpretations of any literary text, we shall briefly explain the focus of feminist readings of the work of Sylvia Plath, with an intention to problematize the way that even this one very specific and challenging corpus of criticism diverges into countless reading avenues. In a chronological context, the critical theory we are observing, i.e. the subject of our interest, belongs to the last three decades of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first century. We shall also demonstrate, by way of illustration, that the lump characterization, proposed by some authors, may hold for the concrete examples which accompany our analysis. Index Terms--interpretation, text, context, American poetry, Sylvia Plath