Abstract: I am pleased to announce that the next Emily Dickinson Journal, coming out in fall 2017, will be devoted to the theme "Emily Dickinson and Literary Celebrity" with Paul Crumbley as guest editor. Contributors will include Elizabeth Petrino, Páraic Finnerty, Jane Wald, and Paul himself. The issue's topic builds upon presentations made during a panel Paul chaired, "Dickinson and Celebrity: The Angled Road of Literary Fame," at the 2016 EDIS International Conference in Paris.Paul says of his theme, "Of Dickinson's many experiments with language, none have provoked greater curiosity and scholarly interest than her exploration of the literary life and the life of literature. Contributors to this special issue of the ... Read More Keywords: Dickinson, Emily,; Edwards, Jonathan,; American poetry PubDate: 2017-05-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In the leading article of the May, 1860 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, titled "Instinct," the author—Leonard Augustus Jones, a Boston lawyer and journalist—admits to humanity's limited powers of observation and interpretation when it comes to animals: "In regard to instinct, as well as everything else, we must be content with finding out what it seems to us to be, rather than what it is" (514). And yet, despite his reverence for the mysteries of the animal mind, Jones also attempts to illustrate the nonhuman animal's incapacity for reason, a faculty he reserves only for humankind. Delving into the dog's brain, for instance, he suggests the animal's inability to discern cause and effect, and he goes on to probe the ... Read More Keywords: Dickinson, Emily,; Edwards, Jonathan,; American poetry PubDate: 2017-05-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: How to read Emily Dickinson's forty sewn booklets (referred to as fascicles) remains an open and contentious question for scholars, all the more relevant since the publication of the first reading edition organized by sheet and fascicle, Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved Them (2016, ed. Cristanne Miller) [reviewed elsewhere in this issue–editor's note]. Early studies of the fascicles that try to find linear narratives—sometimes grounded in the events of Dickinson's life—generally feel thin, or undermine the complexity of the individual poems. More contemporary studies, such as those collected by Paul Crumbley and Eleanor Heginbotham in Dickinson's Facsicles: A Spectrum of Possibilities (2014), instead seek ... Read More Keywords: Dickinson, Emily,; Edwards, Jonathan,; American poetry PubDate: 2017-05-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Among Emily Dickinson's foreign specimens in her herbarium there are pressed flowers of Japanese origin, such as Lonicera japonica (Dickinson 52) and Chaenomeles japonica (Dickinson 27). How did the poet obtain these flowers? Japan was closed to the outside world for almost two hundred and fifty years until Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry pressured the country to open in March 1854. Before that year it was almost impossible for any American to get hold of species of Japanese origin. In this paper I examine Perry's expedition to Japan as one possible way for Dickinson to have obtained Japanese specimens for her herbarium, because there are 15 species in common among the 411 species in Dickinson's herbarium and the ... Read More Keywords: Dickinson, Emily,; Edwards, Jonathan,; American poetry PubDate: 2017-05-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Terence Davies's biopic of Emily Dickinson, A Quiet Passion, was released to movie theaters in the United States in April. Among its most striking features are imaginative cinematography, a compelling narrative, and exceptional performances by Emma Bell and Cynthia Nixon in the role of Emily Dickinson. No doubt the many liberties Davies takes with biographical facts in his screenplay will spark controversy among Dickinson scholars and other devotees. Even so, A Quiet Passion has the potential to inspire viewers to want to read or reread Dickinson's poetry and to question, perhaps even rethink, their conceptions about her life. Davies's two-hour film stands to become the most significant popular culture event in ... Read More Keywords: Dickinson, Emily,; Edwards, Jonathan,; American poetry PubDate: 2017-05-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Jennifer Leader argues in Knowing, Seeing, Being that Jonathan Edwards, Emily Dickinson, and Marianne Moore are key figures in an alternative lineage in American literature rooted in the typological hermeneutics of Reformed Protestantism in which one entity is read as a type that prefigures (foreshadows, anticipates) an eventual divine antitype, or fulfillment. In its most orthodox form, typology is a mode of biblical interpretation in which a person or event in the Old Testament is read as prefiguring the New Testament Christ, but Protestants like Edwards also used typology to read entities in the natural world as types anticipating or disclosing divine truths. While critics like Perry Miller cast Edwards's ... Read More Keywords: Dickinson, Emily,; Edwards, Jonathan,; American poetry PubDate: 2017-05-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In this diligently researched, beautifully crafted, and meticulously documented study of American women poets who positioned themselves in the long shadow of Emily Dickinson, Vivian Pollak extends the psychological approach and gender concerns of Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender (1984) to some of the poet's contemporaries (Helen Hunt Jackson and Mabel Loomis Todd) and successors (Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and – in less detail-Muriel Rukeyser). Her goal is not to document Dickinson's direct influence on her fellow women writers so much as to show how each used Dickinson "to clarify what is at stake in personal and professional battles of their own" (6). There are multiple stories here, often ... Read More Keywords: Dickinson, Emily,; Edwards, Jonathan,; American poetry PubDate: 2017-05-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Despite being widely recognized as one of the most distinctive voices in the American canon, little is known about what plans Emily Dickinson had for the nearly 1800 poems she left behind in manuscript, much less the process by which she composed them. Indeed, speculation about her intentions, competing claims for how (and if) her idiosyncratic handwritten works should be translated to the printed page, and even debate about the texts' status as "poetry" have attended Dickinson's reception since Mabel Loomis Todd's 1890 edition of Poems was first published by Roberts Brothers. The history of Dickinson's manuscripts—the bulk of which were shared first among family, then entrusted to Todd, and finally divided between ... Read More Keywords: Dickinson, Emily,; Edwards, Jonathan,; American poetry PubDate: 2017-05-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In this important and innovative study, Michael Cohen offers social histories of a range of nineteenth-century American poems, examining the ways that circulation and reading practices position writers and readers in complex networks of affiliation. Attending in particular to the ballad and what he argues are its related forms—minstrel songs, contraband songs, and spirituals—Cohen makes a persuasive case both for the cultural centrality and for the rhetorical versatility of poetry in this era. While the development of the ballad forms one argumentative through-line for the book, the career of John Greenleaf Whittier forms another. The project reads Whittier's anti-slavery poems, written for the abolitionist ... Read More Keywords: Dickinson, Emily,; Edwards, Jonathan,; American poetry PubDate: 2017-05-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In collaboration with the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Emily Dickinson International Society will hold its 2017 Annual Meeting August 11-12 in our favorite spot, Amherst. "Edenic Possibilities: Reading and Writing about Emily Dickinson" will feature exciting new scholarship by alums of the EDIS Critical Institutes, reading groups facilitated by well-known scholars meeting in the environs of Emily Dickinson's home and gardens, musical performances, tours of the Dickinson houses, literary walks, and the pleasure of picnicking on the grounds of those homes. Jazz soprano saxophonist and composer Jane Ira Bloom's Wild Lines performance of Dickinson's poetry will be featured Friday evening, and our Saturday late afternoon ... Read More Keywords: Dickinson, Emily,; Edwards, Jonathan,; American poetry PubDate: 2017-05-09T00:00:00-05:00
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