Rejecting the view that interprets Emily Dickinson exclusively as a proto-modernist poet, Joanne Dobson finds Dickinson rooted in the expressive assumptions of her contemporary women writers. By looking at Dickinson in the context of these writers, Dobson uncovers the effects of common grounding in a cultural ethos of femininity that mandated personal reticence. Combining literary history and contemporary feminist literary theory, this study posits a complex interaction of personal preferences and editorial policies that resulted in a community of expression with impact on women's writing and literary careers.

From the contents: Virginia BLAIN: Be these his daughters?: Caroline Bowles Southey, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and disruption in a patriarchal poetics of women's autobiography. - Meg TASKER: 'Aurora Leigh': Elizabeth Barrett Browning's novel approach to the woman poet. - E. WARWICK SLINN: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the problem of female agency. - Debra FRIED: In Daisy's lane: variants and personification in Emily Dickinson.

From the cutting edge to the basics The latest advances as well as the essentials of feminist literary theory are at your fingertips as soon as you open this brand-new reference work. It features-in quick and convenient form-precise definitions of important terms and concise summaries of the salient ideas of critics working in the field who have made significant contributions to feminist literary studies, and points out how a feminist perspective has affected the development of emerging ideas and intellectual practices. Every effort has been made to include as many feminist thinkers as possible. Expanded coverage of key subjects Overview entries cover topics ranging from creativity, beauty, and eroticism topornography, violence, and war, with a thorough exploration of the major theoretical points of feminist literary approaches and concerns. In addition, entries organized around literary periods and fields, such as medieval studies, Shakespeare and Romanticism survey subjects in the framework of feminist literary theory and feminist concerns. Shows how feminist ideas have shaped literary theory The Encyclopedia gathers in one place all the key words, topics, proper names, and critical terminology of feminist literary theory. Emphasis throughout is on usage in the United States and Great Britain since the l970s. Each entry is accompanied by a bibliography that is a point of departure for further research. A key advantage of this Encyclopedia is that it amasses bibliographic references for so many important and often-cited works within a single volume. Instructors especially will find this information invaluable in the preparation of course material. Special FeaturesOffers precise contemporary definitions of all important critical terms * Summarizes the salient ideas of key literary critics * Overviews cover major theoretical issues * Entries on periods and fields survey feminist contributions * Emphasizes terminology that has evolved since the l970s * Indexes proper names, subjects, key words, and related topics

Dickinson's writings were influenced by her ambivalent attitude toward the conventions of the nineteenth-century literary marketplace and her desire to shape more intimate relations with chosen contemporaries. Still, her poems and letters engage modern readers and speak to the social and gendered politics of our own day. The essays in Dickinson and Audience treat both the importance of Dickinson's personal friendships and the ways in which contemporary poetics continue to sustain the vitality of her writings. With contributions from Willis J. Buckingham, Karen Dandurand, Betsy Erkkila, Virginia Jackson, Charlotte Nekola, Martin Orzeck, David Porter, Robert Regan, Richard B. Sewall, R. McClure Smith, Stephanie A. Tingley, and Robert Weisbuch, the collection boasts a wide variety of critical approaches to the poet and her works - from traditional biographical and historical analyses to deconstructionist, feminist, and reader-response interpretations.

Long untouched by contemporary events, ideas and environments, Emily Dickinson's writings have been the subject of intense historical research in recent years. This volume of thirty-three essays by leading scholars offers a comprehensive introduction to the contexts most important for the study of Dickinson's writings. While providing an overview of their topic, the essays also present groundbreaking research and original arguments, treating the poet's local environments, literary influences, social, cultural, political and intellectual contexts, and reception. A resource for scholars and students of American literature and poetry in English, the collection is an indispensable contribution to the study not only of Dickinson's writings but also of the contexts for poetic production and circulation more generally in the nineteenth-century United States.

On the occasion of Robert Rehder's seventieth birthday, this Festschrift pays tribute to a forceful and inspiring teacher who is both a poet himself and the author of major studies on Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens. The contributions reflect the range of Rehder's achievement with essays on Wordsworth and his contemporaries, on the American poets who have been at the centre of his teaching (Whitman, Dickinson, William Carlos Williams), and on recent figures such as Thom Gunn, and Seamus Heaney. It concludes with some appreciations of Robert Rehder's own poetry. This volume addresses all those who are concerned with poetry in the age of Wordsworth, with the poetry of our own age, and with the continuities between them. Robert Rehder has been Professor of American and English Literature at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, since 1985.

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.