Conway, Cathleen Allyn. 2023. ‘She is the vampire of us all’: Exploring the vampire poetics of Sylvia Plath [containing Bloofer, a collection of found poems about the female vampire]. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

This thesis comprises a collection of found poems and an exploration of the concept behind the writing process, which posits a Gothic reading of Sylvia Plath’s oeuvre as vampire text, proceeding “to vampire” from her literary corpus in a framework I call “vampire poetics”. It contains the full collection of poems, Bloofer, and three chapters that locate Plath as “vampire”, demonstrate the act of “vampiring” to write poems, testing the argument by examining two other poets who used Plath as a source-text in a similar means to create entirely different outcomes.

My creative use of Plath’s work is uncomfortable to some scholars of her work; the female vampire in particular is an abject construct, and thus provides a vehicle for the abject act of vampire poetics. As a poet, I use the Vampire Sylvia concept as a lens to not only circumvent the lyric “I” but also present Plath as symbol. Using my vampire poetics framework, the collection aims to vocalise unexplored, unexamined narratives of unwilling, resistant vampire women. The meaning of the text is created through the process of its appropriation and manipulation.

The collection is the product of this practice, in which I view conceptual poetic forms as acts of ‘vampirism’: I denominalise the noun ‘vampire’ as a verb: by verbing the noun, I create ‘to vampire’, meaning to extract poetry from. Plath said ‘the blood jet is poetry’ so I ‘vampire’ the oeuvre of Sylvia Plath, and vampire literature with she/they/gay female protagonists, to create these poems. The conceptual strategies and techniques I used to vampire the poems show that they can be used for lyric, confessional purposes, specifically processes and practices such as erasure, patchwriting, and extraction.

In Bloofer, by developing my own vampire poetics, I re-imagine vampire characters as a feminist act. Their voices are amplified to overcome previous interpretations of what they ‘mean’ as characters, symbols, plot devices, tools of patriarchy, and authorial intent.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00034327
Keywords:	Sylvia Plath; Gothic; conceptual poetry; poetics; vampires; vampire poetics
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	English and Comparative Literature
Date:	31 October 2023
Item ID:	34327
Date Deposited:	10 Nov 2023 18:17
Last Modified:	10 Nov 2023 18:17
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/34327

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