Emily Dickinson wrote a "letter to the world" and left it lying
in her drawer more than a century ago. This widely admired epistle
was her poems, which were never conventionally published in book
form during her lifetime. Since the posthumous discovery of her
work, general readers and literary scholars alike have puzzled over
this paradox of wanting to communicate widely and yet apparently
refusing to publish. In this pathbreaking study, Martha Nell Smith
unravels the paradox by boldly recasting two of the oldest and
still most frequently asked questions about Emily Dickinson: Why
didn't she publish more poems while she was alive? and Who was her
most important contemporary audience?
Regarding the question of publication, Smith urges a
reconception of the act of publication itself. She argues that
Dickinson did publish her work in letters and in forty manuscript
books that circulated among a cultured network of correspondents,
most important of whom was her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington
Gilbert Dickinson. Rather than considering this material
unpublished because unprinted, Smith views its alternative
publication as a conscious strategy on the poet's part, a daring
poetic experiment that also included Dickinson's unusual
punctuation, line breaks, stanza divisions, calligraphic
orthography, and bookmaking--all the characteristics that later
editors tried to standardize or eliminate in preparing the poems
for printing.
Dickinson's relationship with her most important reader, Sue
Dickinson, has also been lost or distorted by multiple levels of
censorship, Smith finds. Emphasizing the poet-sustaining aspects of
the passionate bonds between the two women, Smith shows that their
relationship was both textual and sexual. Based on study of the
actual holograph poems, Smith reveals the extent of Sue Dickinson's
collaboration in the production of poems, most notably "Safe in
Their Alabaster Chambers." This finding will surely challenge the
popular conception of the isolated, withdrawn Emily Dickinson.
Well-versed in poststructuralist, feminist, and new textual
criticism, Rowing in Eden uncovers the process by which the
conventional portrait of Emily Dickinson was drawn and offers
readers a chance to go back to original letters and poems and look
at the poet and her work through new eyes. It will be of great
interest to a wide audience in literary and feminist studies.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!