Emily Dickinson's poetry is known and read worldwide but to date there have been no studies of her reception and influence outside America. This collection of essays brings together international research on her reception abroad including translations, circulation and the responses of private and professional readers to her poetry in different countries. The contributors address key translations of individual poems and lyric sequences; Dickinson's influence on other writers, poets and culture more broadly; biographical constructions of Dickinson as a poet; the political cultural and linguistic contexts of translations; and adaptations into other media. It will appeal to all those interested in the international reception of Dickinson and nineteenth-century American literature more widely.

An exciting new reference work that illuminates the beliefs, customs, events, material culture, and institutions that made up Emily Dickinson's world, giving users a glance at both Dickinson's life and times and the social history of America in the 19th century. While Emily Dickinson is one of the most widely studied American poets, some dimensions of her life and work are largely under-appreciated. This book provides the wider context necessary for a more complete understanding of Dickinson, presenting Dickinson's life and times as well as discussion of her poetry and letters. Prolific author and Dickinson expert Wendy Martin and 59 contributors address the relationship between Emily Dickinson's life and work and the larger world in which she lived. Examination of topics such as the history of Amherst, MA, and the Dickinson family's place in it; and the cultural, financial, political, legal, and religious practices of the day illuminate important dimensions of Dickinson's experiences and world for students, scholars, and general readers of this iconic poet's work.

This is the first compact introduction to Emily Dickinson to focus principally on her poems and their significance to readers. It addresses the question of literary value, considering current controversies over whether Dickinson's writings are best appreciated as visual works or as rhymed and metered poems intended for the ear.

Taking readers through the various stages of criticism of Emily Dickinson's poetry, this guide identifies both the essential critical texts and the key debates within them. The texts chosen for discussion represent the canonical readings which have typically shaped the area of Dickinson studies throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first century and provide a lens through which to view current critical trends. Chapters focus on style and meaning, gender and sexuality, history and race, religion and hymn culture, and performance and popular culture. In all, this guide serves as a user-friendly reference tool to the vast body of criticism on Dickinson to date by suggesting formative starting points and underlining essential critical highlights. It provides students and scholars of Dickinson with a sense of where these critical texts can be placed in relation to one another, as well as an understanding of pivotal moments within the history of reception of Dickinson from late nineteenth-century reviews up to some of the definitive critical interventions of the twenty-first century.

Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886, American poet.

Emily Dickinson (1830-86) recasts British-Romantic themes of natural and spiritual perception for an American audience. Her poems of science and technology reflect her faith in experience. Her lyrics about natural history build on this empiricism and develop her commitment to natural religion. Her poems of revealed religion constitute her experience of faith. Thus Dickinson stands on the experiential common ground between empiricism and evangelicalism in Romantic Anglo-America. Her double perspective parallels the implicit androgyny of her nineteenth-century feminism. Her counterintuitive combination of natural models with spiritual metaphors champions immortality. The experience/faith dialectic of her Late-Romantic imagination forms the heart of her legacy.

The Handbook of American Romanticism presents a comprehensive survey of the various schools, authors, and works that constituted antebellum literature in the United States. The volume is designed to feature a selection of representative case studies and to assess them within two complementary frameworks: the most relevant historical, political, and institutional contexts of the antebellum decades and the consequent (re-)appropriations of the Romantic period by academic literary criticism in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The early years of American nationhood, beginning at the close of colonial rule and ending with the onset of the Civil War, saw both a young country and its literature grow in confidence and develop an awareness of self-identity. Pride in the new nation was a primary characteristic of much literary output in the early years of the country, whether in the form of fiction, poetry, drama, essay, travel writing, or journal. As the country grew and generations began to be born on the new land, Romanticism took hold, lauding not only the construct of the nation but also the natural power and potential of the country. This era of American literary expression has left behind a rich legacy of traditionally canonized authors, as well as material published in the growing periodical press that was of immediate importance to the population at the time. Literary Research and the Era of American Nationalism and Romanticism: Strategies and Sources examines the resources that deal with the literature produced in the approximately 70 years of antebellum American literature. Covering all formats, the volume discusses bibliographies, indexes, research guides, archives, special collections, microform, and digital primary text resources and how they are best utilized for a literary research project. Suggestions are offered for best practices for research while exploring a wide selection of resources that run the gamut from classic standards of American literary bibliography through contemporary open-access digital resources.

In this first substantial study of Emily Dickinson's devotion to flowers and gardening, Judith Farr seeks to join both poet and gardener in one creative personality. She casts new light on Dickinson's temperament, her aesthetic sensibility, and her vision of the relationship between art and nature, revealing that the successful gardener's intimate understanding of horticulture helped shape the poet's choice of metaphors for every experience: love and hate, wickedness and virtue, death and immortality. Gardening, Farr demonstrates, was Dickinson's other vocation, more public than the making of poems but analogous and closely related to it. Over a third of Dickinson's poems and nearly half of her letters allude with passionate intensity to her favorite wildflowers, to traditional blooms like the daisy or gentian, and to the exotic gardenias and jasmines of her conservatory. Each flower was assigned specific connotations by the nineteenth century floral dictionaries she knew; thus, Dickinson's association of various flowers with friends, family, and lovers, like the tropes and scenarios presented in her poems, establishes her participation in the literary and painterly culture of her day. A chapter, "Gardening with Emily Dickinson" by Louise Carter, cites family letters and memoirs to conjecture the kinds of flowers contained in the poet's indoor and outdoor gardens. Carter hypothesizes Dickinson's methods of gardening, explaining how one might grow her flowers today. Beautifully illustrated and written with verve, The Gardens of Emily Dickinson will provide pleasure and insight to a wide audience of scholars, admirers of Dickinson's poetry, and garden lovers everywhere. Table of Contents: Introduction 1. Gardening in Eden 2. The Woodland Garden 3. The Enclosed Garden 4. The "Garden in the Brain" 5. Gardening with Emily Dickinson Louise Carter Epilogue: The Gardener in Her Seasons Appendix: Flowers and Plants Grown by Emily Dickinson Abbreviations Notes Acknowledgments Index of Poems Cited Index Reviews of this book: In this first major study of our beloved poet Dickinson's devotion to gardening, Farr shows us that like poetry, gardening was her daily passion, her spiritual sustenance, and her literary inspiration...Rather than speaking generally about Dickinson's gardening habits, as other articles on the subject have done, Farr immerses the reader in a stimulating and detailed discussion of the flowers Dickinson grew, collected, and eulogized...The result is an intimate study of Dickinson that invites readers to imagine the floral landscapes that she saw, both in and out of doors, and to re-create those landscapes by growing the same flowers (the final chapter is chock-full of practical gardening tips). --Maria Kochis, Library Journal Reviews of this book: This is a beautiful book on heavy white paper with rich reproductions of Emily Dickinson's favorite flowers, including sheets from the herbarium she kept as a young girl. But which came first, the flowers or the poems? So intertwined are Dickinson's verses with her life in flowers that they seem to be the lens through which she saw the world. In her day (1830-86), many people spoke 'the language of flowers.' Judith Farr shows how closely the poet linked certain flowers with her few and beloved friends: jasmine with editor Samuel Bowles, Crown Imperial with Susan Gilbert, heliotrope with Judge Otis Lord and day lilies with her image of herself. The Belle of Amherst, Mass., spent most of her life on 14 acres behind her father's house on Main Street. Her gardens were full of scented flowers and blossoming trees. She sent notes with nosegays and bouquets to neighbors instead of appearing in the flesh. Flowers were her messengers. Resisting digressions into the world of Dickinson scholarship, Farr stays true to her purpose, even offering a guide to the flowers the poet grew and how to replicate her gardens. --Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Cuttings from the book: "The pansy, like the anemone, was a favorite of Emily Dickinson because it came up early, announcing the longed-for spring, and, as a type of bravery, could withstand cold and even an April snow flurry or two in her Amherst garden. In her poem the pansy announces itself boldly, telling her it has been 'resoluter' than the 'Coward Bumble Bee' that loiters by a warm hearth waiting for May." "She spoke of the written word as a flower, telling Emily Fowler Ford, for example, 'thank you for writing me, one precious little "forget-me-not" to bloom along my way.' She often spoke of a flower when she meant herself: 'You failed to keep your appointment with the apple-blossoms,' she reproached her friend Maria Whitney in June 1883, meaning that Maria had not visited her . . . Sometimes she marked the day or season by alluding to flowers that had or had not bloomed: 'I said I should send some flowers this week . . . [but] my Vale Lily asked me to wait for her.'" "People were also associated with flowers . . . Thus, her loyal, brisk, homemaking sister Lavinia is mentioned in Dickinson's letters in concert with sweet apple blossoms and sturdy chrysanthemums . . . Emily's vivid, ambitious sister-in-law Susan Dickinson is mentioned in the company of cardinal flowers and of that grand member of the fritillaria family, the Crown Imperial."