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Emily Dickinson's Poetic Art is both an exciting work of literary criticism on a central figure in American literature as well as an invitation for students and researchers to engage with cognitive literary studies. Emily Dickinson's poetry can be challenging and difficult. It paradoxically gives readers a feeling of closeness and intimacy while being puzzling and obscure. Critical interpretations of Dickinson's poems tend to focus on what they mean rather than on what kind of experience they create. A cognitive approach to literary criticism, based on recent cognitive research, helps readers experience and understand the hows and whys of what a poem is saying and doing. These include cognitive linguistic analysis, versification, prosody, cognitive metaphor, schema, blending, and iconicity, all of which explain the sensory, motor, and emotive processes that motivate Dickinson's conceptualizations. By experiencing Dickinson's poetry from a cognitive perspective, readers are able to better understand why we feel so close to the poet and why her poetry endures. Emily Dickinson's Poetic Art: A Cognitive Reading is an important contribution to the study of a major American poet as well as to the vibrant field of cognitive literary studies.

One of America's most celebrated poets, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her lifetime.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.

Editing Emily Dickinson considers the processes through which Dickinson's work has been edited in the twentieth century and how such editorial processes contribute specifically to the production of Emily Dickinson as author. The posthumous editing of her handwritten manuscripts into the conventions of the book and the electronic archive has been informed by editors' assumptions about the literary work; at stake is fundamentally what a Dickinson poem may be, or, rather, how we may approach such an object.

A Study Guide for Emily Dickinson's "I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.