The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson

by Miller, Cristanne; Sánchez-Eppler, Karen

• ISBN13: 9780198833932
• ISBN10: 0198833938
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2022-07-14
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson is designed to engage, inform, interest, and delight students and scholars of Emily Dickinson, of nineteenth-century US literature and cultural studies, of American poetry, and of the lyric. It also establishes potential agendas for future work in the field of Dickinson studies. This is the first collection on Dickinson to foreground the material and social culture of her time while opening new windows to interpretive possibility in ours. The volume strives to balance Dickinson's own center of gravity in the material culture and historical context of nineteenth-century Amherst with the significance of important critical conversations of our present, thus understanding her poetry with the broadest "Latitude of Home"--as she puts it in her poem "Forever-is composed of Nows." Debates about the lyric, about Dickinson's manuscripts and practices of composition, about the viability of translation across language, media, and culture, and about the politics of class, gender, place, and race circulate through this volume. These debates matter to our moment but also to our understanding of hers. Although rooted in the evolving history of Dickinson criticism, the chapters foreground truly new original research and a wide range of innovative critical methodologies, including artistic responses to her poetry by musicians, visual artists, and other poets. The suppleness and daring of Dickinson's thought and uses of language remain open to new possibilities and meanings, even while they are grounded in contexts from over 150 years ago, and this collection expresses and celebrates the breadth of her accomplishments and relevance.

Author Biography

Cristanne Miller, SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of English, University at Buffalo SUNY,Karen Sánchez-Eppler, L. Stanton Williams 1941 Professor of American Studies and English, Amherst College

Cristanne Miller is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor at the University at Buffalo SUNY. She has published broadly on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry. Her books on Dickinson include Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar (1987), Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the
Nineteenth Century (2012), and the edition Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved Them (2016), winner of the MLA Best Scholarly Edition Prize. She serves on the editorial advisory board for the Emily Dickinson Archive and is founder and director of the Marianne Moore Digital Archive.

Karen Sánchez-Eppler is L. Stanton Williams 1941 Professor of American Studies and English at Amherst College and serves on the Board of Governors of the Emily Dickinson Museum. Her first book Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism and the Politics of the Body (1993) included work on Dickinson.
Dependent States: The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (2005) initiated her turn to childhood studies. She is one of the founding co-editors of The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth and past President of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Poetry "Composed of Nows": Dickinson's Historical Context and Contemporary Relevance, Cristanne Miller and Karen Sánchez-Eppler
PART I. "Do they know that this is Amherst": Dickinson in Place
1. Whose Native Place?: The Dickinsons and the Colonization of the Connecticut River Valley, Lisa Brooks
2. "Where congregations ne'er break up": Dickinsons and Amherst's First Church, Jane Donahue Eberwein
3. "The pedigree of Honey": Class, Colony, and Politics in Amherst's "Bee Hive" and Dickinson's Bee Poems, Claire Nasher
4. "Seam by Seam": Dickinson's Literary Labors, Lori Merish
5. A Short Biography of the Homestead and The Evergreens, Jane H. Wald
6. "Except the smaller size": Aunt Emily's Poetry, Karen Sánchez-Eppler
7. The Death of Little Gib, Polly Longworth
8. "The Wanderers came last Night": Dickinson and the Material Culture of Indigenous Basket Sellers, Nan Wolverton
Part II. "Essential Oils": Dickinson's Poetics and Compositional Practices
9. "Dragons--in the Crease--": Dickinson's Dangerous Lyricism, Ryan Cull
10. Dickinson's Spinster Poetics, Kathryn R. Kent
11. The Letter Not Sent: Dickinson's Fascicles and the Poet's Place in the World, Paul Crumbley
12. "My Business is to Love": Address and Affect in Dickinson's Circulated Poems, Judith Scholes
13. Writing for Posterity: Editing, Evidence, and Sequence in Dickinson's Composition and Circulation of Poems, Cristanne Miller
14. The Material and Editorial Condition of Dickinson's "Master" Documents, Marta L. Werner
15. Butterfly Tropics: Dickinson, the Archive, and Ethereal Poetics, Branka Arsic
16. Dickinson's Influence on Recent American Poetry, Rae Armantrout
Part III. "You'll find the Music": Dickinson's Media Contexts
17. "Yellow Noise": Information and Form in Dickinson's Intermedial Writing, Mary Loeffelholz
18. "Say it Again! Saxon!": The Erotic Intimate Space of Reading, Marianne Noble
19. Dickinson Uncut: Reading and Not Reading in Print Culture, Maurice S. Lee
20. "On the wall of her own room hung framed portraits of Mrs. Browning, George Eliot and Carlyle": Dickinson's Heroes and Hero-Worship, Páraic Finnerty
21. Dickinson's Black Contexts, Brigitte Fielder
22. Learning to Write with Emily Dickinson: Poetry, Pedagogy, and Nineteenth-Century Girlhood, Michael C. Cohen
23. Looking Back on the Reception History of Dickinson in Japan, Midori Asahina, Nobuko Shimomura, and Masako Takeda
24. "Discretion in the interval": Musical Improvisation and Dickinson's Manuscript Variations, Gerard Holmes
25. Dickinson Composed, Antoine Cazé
PART IV. "Such are the inlets of the mind--": Ways of Knowing and the World
26. Linguistic Turns: Emersonian Figuralism and Dickinson's Biblical Contests, Shira Wolosky
27. Glory, Honor, Might, Majesty, Dominion, and Power: Reading Dickinson through Wilfred Owen, Benjamin Friedlander
28. "The Finite--furnished / With the Infinite--": Dickinson's Biblical Imaginations, Jennifer Leader
29. Imaginary Geography: Dickinson Latina, Adalberto Müller
30. Dickinson's Garden Ecologies, Christine Gerhardt
31. "You felt your Second": Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping, Michelle Kohler
32. Dickinson Emergent: Natural Philosophy and the Postdisciplinary Manifold, Renée Bergland
33. "How ruthless are the gentle": The Art of Emily Dickinson and Lesley Dill, Lesley Dill
PART V. Coda
34. Living and Dying with Emily Dickinson, Jed Deppman