The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson

Cristanne Miller · Karen Sánchez-Eppler

Apr 2022 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson is designed to engage, inform, interest, and delight students and scholars of Emily Dickinson, of nineteenth-century US literature and cultural studies, of American poetry, and of the lyric. It also establishes potential agendas for future work in the field of Dickinson studies. This is the first collection on Dickinson to foreground the material and social culture of her time while opening new windows to interpretive possibility in ours. The volume strives to balance Dickinson's own center of gravity in the material culture and historical context of nineteenth-century Amherst with the significance of important critical conversations of our present, thus understanding her poetry with the broadest "Latitude of Home"--as she puts it in her poem "Forever-is composed of Nows." Debates about the lyric, about Dickinson's manuscripts and practices of composition, about the viability of translation across language, media, and culture, and about the politics of class, gender, place, and race circulate through this volume. These debates matter to our moment but also to our understanding of hers. Although rooted in the evolving history of Dickinson criticism, the chapters foreground truly new original research and a wide range of innovative critical methodologies, including artistic responses to her poetry by musicians, visual artists, and other poets. The suppleness and daring of Dickinson's thought and uses of language remain open to new possibilities and meanings, even while they are grounded in contexts from over 150 years ago, and this collection expresses and celebrates the breadth of her accomplishments and relevance.

About the author

Cristanne Miller is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor at the University at Buffalo SUNY. She has published broadly on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry. Her books on Dickinson include Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar (1987), Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (2012), and the edition Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved Them (2016), winner of the MLA Best Scholarly Edition Prize. She serves on the editorial advisory board for the Emily Dickinson Archive and is founder and director of the Marianne Moore Digital Archive. Karen Sánchez-Eppler is L. Stanton Williams 1941 Professor of American Studies and English at Amherst College and serves on the Board of Governors of the Emily Dickinson Museum. Her first book Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism and the Politics of the Body (1993) included work on Dickinson. Dependent States: The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (2005) initiated her turn to childhood studies. She is one of the founding co-editors of The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth and past President of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.