The Bell Jar is a highly distinctive and unusual book, and although the era of the 1950's it represents has faded and disappeared into history, the power of this novel does not dissipate. The original essays in this volume each take on a specific angle from which to examine the work. One essay discusses the issue of nature vs. nurture in the novel, while another discusses the similarities between Plath's work and Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted. The older essays provide some of the finest scholarship on The Bell Jar that has been made available over the years, and offer a wide variety of critical approaches to this work.

On The bell jar -- Biography of Sylvia Plath-- The Paris review perspective -- "The domesticated wilderness" : patriarchal oppression in the bell jar -- Sylvia Plath's The bell jar : understanding cultural and historical context in an iconic text -- Interruptions in a patriarchal world : Sylvia Plath's The bell jar and Susanna Kaysen's Girl, interrupted -- Sylvia Plath's The bell jar : critical reception -- Sentient patterning in The bell jar -- "I have your head on my wall" : Sylvia Plath and the rhetoric of Cold War America -- The radical imaginary of The bell jar -- Plath, domesticity, and the art of advertising -- The feminist discourse of Sylvia Plath's The bell jar -- Sylvia Plath's anti-psychiatry -- Mad girls' love songs : two women poets, a professor and graduate student, discuss Sylvia Plath, angst, and the poetics of female adolescence -- (Sub)textual configurations : sexual ambivalences in Sylvia Plath's The bell jar -- "The woman is perfected, her dead body wears the smile of accomplishment" : Sylvia Plath and Mademoiselle magazine -- Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath : the self at stake -- The fig tree and the black patent leather shoes : the body and its representation in Sylvia Plath's The bell jar.