Dickinson's Misery

Dickinson's Misery PDF Author: Virginia Jackson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400850754
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
How do we know that Emily Dickinson wrote poems? How do we recognize a poem when we see one? In Dickinson's Misery, Virginia Jackson poses fundamental questions about reading habits we have come to take for granted. Because Dickinson's writing remained largely unpublished when she died in 1886, decisions about what it was that Dickinson wrote have been left to the editors, publishers, and critics who have brought Dickinson's work into public view. The familiar letters, notes on advertising fliers, verses on split-open envelopes, and collections of verses on personal stationery tied together with string have become the Dickinson poems celebrated since her death as exemplary lyrics. Jackson makes the larger argument that the century and a half spanning the circulation of Dickinson's work tells the story of a shift in the publication, consumption, and interpretation of lyric poetry. This shift took the form of what this book calls the "lyricization of poetry," a set of print and pedagogical practices that collapsed the variety of poetic genres into lyric as a synonym for poetry. Featuring many new illustrations from Dickinson's manuscripts, this book makes a major contribution to the study of Dickinson and of nineteenth-century American poetry. It maps out the future for new work in historical poetics and lyric theory.

Dickinson's Misery

Dickinson's Misery PDF Author: Virginia Jackson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400850754
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
How do we know that Emily Dickinson wrote poems? How do we recognize a poem when we see one? In Dickinson's Misery, Virginia Jackson poses fundamental questions about reading habits we have come to take for granted. Because Dickinson's writing remained largely unpublished when she died in 1886, decisions about what it was that Dickinson wrote have been left to the editors, publishers, and critics who have brought Dickinson's work into public view. The familiar letters, notes on advertising fliers, verses on split-open envelopes, and collections of verses on personal stationery tied together with string have become the Dickinson poems celebrated since her death as exemplary lyrics. Jackson makes the larger argument that the century and a half spanning the circulation of Dickinson's work tells the story of a shift in the publication, consumption, and interpretation of lyric poetry. This shift took the form of what this book calls the "lyricization of poetry," a set of print and pedagogical practices that collapsed the variety of poetic genres into lyric as a synonym for poetry. Featuring many new illustrations from Dickinson's manuscripts, this book makes a major contribution to the study of Dickinson and of nineteenth-century American poetry. It maps out the future for new work in historical poetics and lyric theory.

Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare

Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare PDF Author: Páraic Finnerty
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
"Through analysis of letters, journals, diaries, records, periodicals, newspapers, and marginalia, Finnerty juxtaposes Dickinson's engagement with Shakespeare with the responses of her contemporaries. Her Shakespeare emerges as an immoral dramatist and highly moral poet; a highbrow symbol of class and cultivation and a lowbrow popular entertainer; an impetus behind the emerging American theater criticism and an English author threatening American creativity; a writer culturally approved for women and yet one whose authority women often appropriated to critique their culture. Such a context allows the explication of Dickinson's specific references to Shakespeare and further conjecture about how she most likely read him."--BOOK JACKET.

The Lyric Theory Reader

The Lyric Theory Reader PDF Author: Virginia Walker Jackson
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421412004
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 678

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Book Description
Reading lyric poetry over the past century. The Lyric Theory Reader collects major essays on the modern idea of lyric, made available here for the first time in one place. Representing a wide range of perspectives in Anglo-American literary criticism from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the collection as a whole documents the diversity and energy of ongoing critical conversations about lyric poetry. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins frame these conversations with a general introduction, bibliographies for further reading, and introductions to each of the anthology’s ten sections: genre theory, historical models of lyric, New Criticism, structuralist and post-structuralist reading, Frankfurt School approaches, phenomenologies of lyric reading, avant-garde anti-lyricism, lyric and sexual difference, and comparative lyric. Designed for students, teachers, scholars, poets, and readers with a general interest in poetics, this book presents an intellectual history of the theory of lyric reading that has circulated both within and beyond the classroom, wherever poetry is taught, read, discussed, and debated today.

Misery's Mathematics

Misery's Mathematics PDF Author: Peter Balaam
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135884323
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
This book reveals the strain of a moment in American cultural history that led several remarkable writers -- including Emerson, Warner, and Melville -- to render the stark rupture of loss in innovative ways. Pushing Protestant culture's sense of loss into secular terrain, these three key writers rejected Calvinist and sentimental models of bereavement, creating instead the compensations of a mature American literature whose 'originality' stemmed from its capacity to mourn the loss of a common culture and, through such mourning, to assent to new social and cultural realities. Balaam locates this appeal to 'reality' in the analogies antebellum writers drew between their experience of bereavement, and the experiences of uncertainty and disillusionment, that followed the revolutions in science, the winding down of creedal systems and the economic instability typifying the pre-Civil War era.

Dickinson Unbound

Dickinson Unbound PDF Author: Alexandra Socarides
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190240830
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
In Dickinson Unbound, Alexandra Socarides takes readers on a journey through the actual steps and stages of Emily Dickinson's creative process. In chapters that deftly balance attention to manuscripts, readings of poems, and a consideration of literary and material culture, Socarides takes up each of the five major stages of Dickinson's writing career: copying poems onto folded sheets of stationery; inserting and embedding poems into correspondence; sewing sheets together to make fascicles; scattering loose sheets; and copying lines on often torn and discarded pieces of household paper. In so doing, Socarides reveals a Dickinsonian poetics starkly different from those regularly narrated by literary history. Here, Dickinson is transformed from an elusive poetic genius whose poems we have interpreted in a vacuum into an author who employed surprising (and, at times, surprisingly conventional) methods to wholly new effect. Dickinson Unbound gives us a Dickinson at once more accessible and more complex than previously imagined. As the first authoritative study of Dickinson's material and compositional methods, this book not only transforms our ways of reading Dickinson, but advocates for a critical methodology that insists on the study of manuscripts, composition, and material culture for poetry of the nineteenth century and thereafter.

Reading in Time

Reading in Time PDF Author: Cristanne Miller
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
ISBN: 1558499512
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This book provides new information about Emily Dickinson as a writer and new ways of situating this poet in relation to nineteenth-century literary culture, examining how we read her poetry and how she was reading the poetry of her own day. Cristanne Miller argues both that Dickinson's poetry is formally far closer to the verse of her day than generally imagined and that Dickinson wrote, circulated, and retained poems differently before and after 1865. Many current conceptions of Dickinson are based on her late poetic practice. Such conceptions, Miller contends, are inaccurate for the time when she wrote the great majority of her poems. Before 1865, Dickinson at least ambivalently considered publication, circulated relatively few poems, and saved almost everything she wrote in organized booklets. After this date, she wrote far fewer poems, circulated many poems without retaining them, and took less interest in formally preserving her work. Yet, Miller argues, even when circulating relatively few poems, Dickinson was vitally engaged with the literary and political culture of her day and, in effect, wrote to her contemporaries. Unlike previous accounts placing Dickinson in her era, Reading in Time demonstrates the extent to which formal properties of her poems borrow from the short-lined verse she read in schoolbooks, periodicals, and single-authored volumes. Miller presents Dickinson's writing in relation to contemporary experiments with the lyric, the ballad, and free verse, explores her responses to American Orientalism, presents the dramatic lyric as one of her preferred modes for responding to the Civil War, and gives us new ways to understand the patterns of her composition and practice of poetry.

Lyric Time

Lyric Time PDF Author: Sharon Cameron
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Lyric Time offers a detailed critical reading of a particularly difficult poet, an analysis of the dominance of temporal structures and concerns in the body of her poetry, and finally, an important original contribution to a theory of the lyric. Poised between analysis of Emily Dickinson's poetic texts and theoretical inquiry, Lyric Time suggests that the temporal problems of Dickinson's poems are frequently exaggerations of the features that distinguish the lyric as a genre. "It is precisely the distance some of Dickinson's poems go toward the far end of coherence, precisely the outlandishness of their extremity, that allows us to see, magnified, the fine workings of more conventional lyrics," writes Sharon Cameron. Lyric Time is written for the literary audience at large—Dickinsonians, romanticists, theorists, anyone interested in American poetry, or in poetry at all, and especially anyone who admires a risky book that succeeds.

Dickinson's Nerves, Frost's Woods

Dickinson's Nerves, Frost's Woods PDF Author: William Logan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231546513
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
In Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods, William Logan, the noted and often controversial critic of contemporary poetry, returns to some of the greatest poems in English literature. He reveals what we may not have seen before and what his critical eye can do with what he loves. In essays that pair different poems—“Ozymandias,” “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” “In a Station of the Metro,” “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” among others—Logan reconciles history and poetry to provide new ways of reading poets ranging from Shakespeare and Shelley to Lowell and Heaney. In these striking essays, Logan presents the poetry of the past through the lens of the past, attempting to bring poems back to the world in which they were made. Logan’s criticism is informed by the material culture of that world, whether postal deliveries in Regency London, the Métro lighting in 1911 Paris, or the wheelbarrows used in 1923. Deeper knowledge of the poet’s daily existence lets us read old poems afresh, providing a new way of understanding poems now encrusted with commentary. Logan shows that criticism cannot just root blindly among the words of the poem but must live partly in a lost world, in the shadow of the poet’s life and the shadow of the age.

The Poetry of Emily Dickinson

The Poetry of Emily Dickinson PDF Author: Victoria N. Morgan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350380105
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Taking readers through the various stages of criticism of Emily Dickinson's poetry, this guide identifies both the essential critical texts and the key debates within them. The texts chosen for discussion represent the canonical readings which have typically shaped the area of Dickinson studies throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first century and provide a lens through which to view current critical trends. Chapters focus on style and meaning, gender and sexuality, history and race, religion and hymn culture, and performance and popular culture. In all, this guide serves as a user-friendly reference tool to the vast body of criticism on Dickinson to date by suggesting formative starting points and underlining essential critical highlights. It provides students and scholars of Dickinson with a sense of where these critical texts can be placed in relation to one another, as well as an understanding of pivotal moments within the history of reception of Dickinson from late nineteenth-century reviews up to some of the definitive critical interventions of the twenty-first century.

The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson

The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson PDF Author: Cristanne Miller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192570692
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
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.