Author: Wendy Barker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Feminism and literature
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
"Are you afraid of the sun?" Emily Dickinson asked a friend in 1859. Wendy Barker states here that that apparently casual query reveals a major theme of Dickinson’s poetry, a theme she shares with women writers ranging from Anne Finch to Anne Sexton. It is a tradition based upon the inversion of the traditional male-centered metaphors of light and dark. Through time the light-giving sun has represented vitality, order, God; the light-swallowing night death, chaos, Satan. These metaphors are reinforced in the writing of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Keats,but Eliot, Brontë, Browning, and Dickinson use the sun and images of light quite differently. Barker argues that since light was a masculine tradition, it had come to represent male power, energy, sexuality—not only to Dickinson but to other women writing during the era. To these writers the inversion of the light/darkness metaphor became a countertradition used as a means to express their energies in a society that was hostile to their intelligence. Dickinson, who read avidly, could not have been insensitive to this usage of light as a masculine symbol—of her Calvinist God, of her father, of all that was male—and of darkness as a feminine symbol. Emily Dickinson thought in a richly symbolic manner. Her most frequently used metaphor is one of light in contrast to darkness, employing single-word references to light more than one thousand times in her 1,775 poems. Barker offers close readings and new interpretations of some previously overlooked or misunderstood poems and demonstrates that "Many of her most ecstatic images are of little lights created from darkness." In answer to those critics who have characterized her poems as being piecemeal, Barker argues that Dickinson’s consistent use of light as a metaphor unifies her poetry. In her final chapter, Barker explores the ways in which twentieth-century female writers have carried on the countertradition of the light/darkness metaphor. "That Dickinson was able so brilliantly to transform and transcend the normative metaphoric patterning of her culture, creating, in effect, a metaphor of her own, has much to do with the genius of her art."
Author: Susan Tyler Hitchcock
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393057416
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
After killing her mother with a carving knife, Mary Lamb spent the rest of her life in and out of madhouses; yet the crime and its aftermath opened up a new life. Freed to read extensively, she discovered her talent for writing and, with her brother, the essayist Charles Lamb, collaborated on the famous Tales from Shakespeare. This narrative of a nearly forgotten woman is a tapestry of insights into creativity and madness, the changing lives of women, and the redemptive power of the written word.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Christian Science
Languages : en
Pages : 714
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Book Description
Author: Wendy Martin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107494540
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 389
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Book Description
Emily Dickinson, one of the most important American poets of the nineteenth century, remains an intriguing and fascinating writer. The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson includes eleven new essays by accomplished Dickinson scholars. They cover Dickinson's biography, publication history, poetic themes and strategies, and her historical and cultural contexts. As a woman poet, Dickinson's literary persona has become incredibly resonant in the popular imagination. She has been portrayed as singular, enigmatic, and even eccentric. At the same time, Dickinson is widely acknowledged as one of the founders of American poetry, an innovative pre-modernist poet as well as a rebellious and courageous woman. This volume introduces new and practised readers to a variety of critical responses to Dickinson's poetry and life, and provides several valuable tools for students, including a chronology and suggestions for further reading.
Author: Cynthia L. MacKinnon
Publisher: Writers Cafe Press
ISBN: 9781934284001
Category : Christian fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
When forced to the edge of darkness, there's only one way back: embrace the Light.
Author: John Steward Oxley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Railroad law
Languages : en
Pages : 504
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Book Description
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law reports, digests, etc
Languages : en
Pages : 1346
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Book Description
Author: David S. Herrstrom
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683933648
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 389
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Book Description
In Light as Experience and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times, David S. Herrstrom synthesizes and interprets the experience of light as revealed in a wide range of art and literature from medieval to modern times. The true subject of the book is making sense of the individual’s relationship with light, rather than the investigation of light’s essential nature, while telling the story of light “seducing” individuals from the Middle Ages to our modern times. Consequently, it is not concerned with the “progress” of scientific inquiries into the physical properties and behavior of light (optical science), but rather with subjective reactions as reflected in art, architecture, and literature. Instead of its evolution, this book celebrates the complexity of our relation to light’s character. No individual experience of light being “truer” than any other.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Parapsychology
Languages : en
Pages : 608
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Book Description
Author: Stephen Leacock
Publisher: New York : J. Lane ; Toronto : S.B. Gundy
ISBN:
Category : Canadian wit and humor
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
