The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism offers a new perspective on American literary naturalism that considers those under-researched aspects of the genre that can be gathered under the term the Nonhuman. The contributors, an international team of scholars, have turned their attention to that which becomes visible when the human subject is skirted, or perhaps, temporarily at least, moved off-center: in other words, the representation of nonhuman animals and other vital or inert species, things, entities, cityscapes and seascapes, that also appear and play an important part in American literary naturalism. Informed by animal studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, new materialism, and other recent theoretical and philosophical perspectives, the essays in this collection discuss early naturalist texts by Norris, Crane, Dreiser, London, Wharton and Cather, as well as more recent followers in the tradition of American literary naturalism: Hemingway, Agee & Evans, Petry, Hamilton, Dick, Vonnegut, Tepper, and DeLillo. The collection responds to a need to expand and refine the connections among nonhuman studies and texts associated with American literary naturalism and to productively expand the scholarly discourse surrounding this vital movement in American literary history.

Emily Dickinson's life and art have fascinated -- and perplexed -- the poet's admirers for more than a century. One of the most hotly debated elements of Dickinson's poetry has been her unconventional use of punctuation. Now, in Inflections of the Pen, Paul Crumbley unravels many of these stylistic mysteries in his careful examination of manuscript versions of her poems -- including selections from the fascicles, Dickinson's own hand-bound gatherings of her poems -- and of Dickinson's letters. Crumbley argues that the dash is the key to deciphering the poet's complex experiments with poetic voice.

From the time of Dickinson's first editors, Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, standard versions of her poetry have tended to normalize the poems. Designated as either em- or en-dashes in print by all but a few recent editors, Dickinson's dash marks in the holography versions vary tremendously in length, height, and angle. According to Crumbley, these varied dashes suggest subtle gradations of inflection and syntactic disjunction. The printed poems give the impression of a unified voice, whereas the dashes that appear in the manuscripts disrupt conventional thought patterns and suggest multiple voices.

The dash, therefore, becomes Dickinson's most expressive visual signal. Crumbley believes that Dickinson's unorthodox practice grants her readers the right to question linguistic authority. No one voice seems to have primacy in Dickinson's poetry. Instead, the poems provoke multiple readings that simultaneously affirm and challenge the dominant social and political values of nineteenth-century America.

An innovative exploration of Emily Dickinson as a political poet. In this study, Paul Crumbley asserts that, contrary to popular opinion, Emily Dickinson consistently communicated political views through her poetry. Dickinson's life of self-isolation - today her most notable personal characteristic - by no means extended into the political sphere, he argues. While she rarely addressed political issues directly and was curiously disengaged from the liberal causes and female reform movements of her time, Dickinson's poems are deeply rooted both in matters of personal sovereignty and reader choice. The significant choices Dickinson extends to the reader underscore the democratic dimensions of reading her work, and of reading itself as a political act. Crumbley employs close readings of Dickinson's poems and letters, highlighting the many changing - and often contradictory - voices in her work, both throughout her oeuvre and in individual poems themselves. In Dickinson's letters Crumbley finds just as many unique and conflicting voices; thus, both her personal correspondence and the poems make political demands by placing the burden of interpretation on the reader. Rather than reflecting explicit political values, Dickinson's work chronicles an ongoing decision-making process that magnifies the role of individual choice, not the advocacy of specific outcomes. In the end, Dickinson's readers must either accept an isolated lyric subjectivity or invest that subjectivity with the substance necessary for engagement with the larger world.