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.

One of America's most celebrated poets, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her lifetime. When a slim volume of her poems emerged on the American scene in 1890, her work created shockwaves that have not subsided yet. Famously precise and sparse, Emily Dickinson's poetry is often described as philosophical, both because her poetry grapples with philosophical topics like death, spirituality, and the darkening operations of the mind, and because she approaches those topics in a characteristically philosophical manner: analyzing and extrapolating from close observation, exploring alternatives, and connecting thoughts into cumulative demonstrations. But unlike Lucretius or Pope, she cannot be accused of producing versified treatises. Many of her poems are unsettling in their lack of conclusion; their disparate insights often stand in conflict; and her logic turns crucially on imagery, juxtaposition, assonance, slant rhyme, and punctuation. The six chapters of this volume collectively argue that Dickinson is an epistemically ambitious poet, who explores fundamental questions by advancing arguments that are designed to convince. Dickinson exemplifies abstract ideas in tangible form and habituates readers into productive trains of thought--she doesn't just make philosophical claims, but demonstrates how poetry can make a distinct contribution to philosophy. All essays in this volume, drawn from both philosophers and literary theorists, serve as a counterpoint to recent critical work, which has emphasized Dickinson's anguished uncertainty, her nonconventional style, and the unsettled status of her manuscripts. On the view that emerges here, knowing is like cleaning, mending, and lacemakingL a form of hard, ongoing work, but one for which poetry is a powerful, perhaps indispensable, tool.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 65%, University of Reading (Department of English and American Literature), course: Writing America 2, 11 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Before we deal with gender identity it is first of all important to understand the definition of gender. The Oxford Companion to African-American Literature explains it as follows: "Gender is different from sexuality [sic!]. Sexuality concerns physical and biological differences that distinguish males from females. Cultures construct differences in gender. These social constructions attach themselves to behaviors, expectations, roles, representations, and sometimes to values and beliefs that are specific to either men and women." In this following paper I'm going to analyse the different gender identities appearing in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and the autobiography of Frederick Douglass.1 My main focus is concentrated on the use and description of gender in both genres. How are gender identities characterized and how do we get to know them? Which gender does Dickinson use in the chosen poems and how are their identities constructed? Referring to Douglass it is interesting to look at how he constitutes himself as an identity. Referring to Emily Dickinson, I chose several poems, like "I'm "wife" - I've finished that-," "I felt my life with both hands," "A Wife- at Daybreak I shall be," "I was the slightest in the House-" and "I tie my Hat." Gender Identities in Emily Dickinson's Poetry In the lyric poem there is for the most part no description of who is speaking, no embodiment, no development, no introduced "character." For example, Dickinson's various personae or self-positionings as "Earl," "Wife" or "Queen" are known either only by the tone and manner of the text or by self-naming within the poem's text. Dickinson's speaker exclaims "A Wife - at Daybreak- I shall be-" but the poem provides no corroboration of th

Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886, American poet.

Traces the roots of Dickinson's unusual, compressed, ungrammatical, and richly ambiguous style of poetry.

Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson is an encyclopedic guide to the life and works of Emily Dickinson, one of the most famous and widely studied American poets of the 19th century.

This is a collection of poems by Emily Dickinson, who used words to paint vivid pictures.

Study and analysis of Emily Dickinson's poetry with a sensitive discussion of its sexual imagery.

American poet Emily Dickinson is revered around the world, and influenced many feminist artists and writers. Her work is some of the best known and most quoted or adapted: 'Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all' Emily Dickinson Dickinson received a very good education, but chose to return home to Amherst, Massachusetts, where she spent the rest of her life, writing more than a poem a day until her death. Her refusal to compromise her highly condensed expression meant that only a tiny fraction of her work was published in her lifetime. Even today, her work feels startlingly modern: 'Dogs are better than human beings because they know but do not tell' Emily Dickinson 'The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul - BOOKS' This is a superb collection from a truly iconic poet.