Call for Papers – A Celebration This Is: Ariel at 60
2025-06-07
For volume 15, we are open to receiving submissions that celebrate, respond to, and review Plath’s Ariel at 60. We are also looking for book reviews of the newly released (from 2023-) on Sylvia Plath.
When Sylvia Plath’s poetry collection Ariel blazed onto the literary scene sixty years ago, on 11 March 1965, published by Faber, it was met with critical and commercial success. Just like Plath herself predicted, the poems in Ariel made her name. A year later, it met with similar success as it was published in the U.S by Harper& Row. The voice of Ariel is at once tender, brave, angry, proud, and curious. At 60, the collection has remained marvellously youthful, daring, and relevant. This Call for Papers celebrates the 60th anniversary of this extraordinary collection by putting together the next issue of Plath Profiles. Academic articles may directly engage with Plath as a historical subject, literary giant, and contested site; may utilize feminist, postcolonial, poststructural, queer, multilingual, and other strategies to analyse Plath’s work; or may propose a new path for Plath studies. Profiles is an inclusive journal, and we particularly encourage topics from unexplored areas and authors from underrepresented backgrounds. We encourage submissions from postdoctoral students, early-career researchers, as well as from established scholars. We are particularly encouraging diverse, interdisciplinary, and novel responses and critical approaches to Plath’s Ariel.
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
- Poetic Places (Gallipoli, Boston, France, England, Munich and other places)
- Plath and History
- Ariel and the BBC radio readings
- Plath and Film Studies
- Green Plath
- Plath and the Thinginess of Things
- Vulnerability and Emotional Labour
- Plath and Music (Beethoven, Mozart’s Don Juan)
- Teaching Ariel
- Translations and reception of Ariel in non-Anglophone countries
- Transatlantic Ariel.
Submission deadline: 30 September 2025