Feminist Digital Humanities and the Harriet Rosenstein Sylvia Plath Archive

Abstract

The paper focuses on reinterpreting the Harriet Rosenstein archive, containing a vast amount of previously unavailable materials concerning Sylvia Plath, as a source of feminist literary recovery. It also investigates the digitization of this archive in the larger context of a digital turn in Plath studies, and a potential connection with feminist digital humanities. The archive contains a vast number of Sylvia Plath-related documents that have been recently opened to the public at Emory University after almost five decades. Rosenstein was a young researcher with feminist critical interests at the time she documented a projected Plath biography, and her work bears the mark of her ideological options and of a distinct intention to reshape the cultural discourse around Plath’s status as a feminist icon. My aim is to investigate the feminist itinerary Rosenstein created in her archive in order to reveal Plath’s essential role as a female writer articulating innovative perspectives on women’s issues, mythologies and fundamental themes.