REPRESENTATIONS OF AUTHORITY FIGURES AND TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCE: LOWELL AND PLATH
REPRESENTATIONS OF AUTHORITY FIGURES AND TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCE: LOWELL AND PLATH

Summary/Abstract: Paradoxically, representations of, and responses to, traumatic experience in relation to authority figures had become particularly outstanding in American literature in the early postwar age, in what had been perceived as the most conformist years, the late 1950s and early 1960s. Some of the most memorable of them were in relation to authoritative patriarchal figures ranging from the personal to the public sphere. These representations involved individual responses like those manifested in the tranquilized Fifties in what came to be called Beat and confessional poetry, responses to tradition, the Establishment, public figures. Given the limited space of the current text, the emphasis will be on Lowell and transatlantic Plath, while a variety of voices and figures provide the thick texture in which the two authors’ memorable contributions are to be assessed.

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