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.

“Scandal and pathos abound” (The New Yorker) in this riveting account of the mother and daughter who brought Emily Dickinson’s genius to light. Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography • Finalist for the Plutarch Award Despite Emily Dickinson’s renown, the story of the two women most responsible for her initial posthumous publication—Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham—has remained in the shadows of the archives. Utilizing hundreds of overlooked letters and diaries to weave together three unstoppable women, Julie Dobrow reveals the intrigue of Dickinson’s literary beginnings, including Mabel’s tumultuous affair with Emily’s brother, Austin Dickinson, controversial editorial decisions, and a battle over the right to define the so-called Belle of Amherst.

Emily Dickinson has often been pictured as a sensitive but isolated poet--someone who published very little in her lifetime and limited herself to lyrics, considered to be the kind of poems most removed from social and political life. In recent years, scholars have challenged that view, and this book extends the discussion in valuable new directions. Domhnall Mitchell begins by focusing on three historical phenomena--the railroad, the Dickinson homestead, and horticulture--and argues that poems about trains, home, and flowers engage with thei meanings in ways that extend beyond the confines of the aesthetic. He shows how Dickinson's poems and letters reveal the full complexity of her position as a woman situated within a larger social and economic class. In the second half of the book, Mitchell considers the ideological, textual, and editorial implications of Dickinson's strategic privatization of her art. He relates the particular forms of her manuscripts' appearance, distribution, and collation to aspects of her social as well as her literary consciousness. In a chapter that is certain to provoke debate, he explores what it means to read individual poems and letters in manuscript versions rather than in printed editions. By paying close attention to textual evidence, he makes the case that various features of the manuscripts are actually matters of accident or immediate convenience rather than the visual markers of a new aestheic principle. Mitchell closes by using the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to explore the contradictions of a "private" poetry that engages verbally in multiple areas of nineteenth-century life and discourse. By attending to the contemporaneous particularities of recurrent words and images, he demonstrates that Dickinson could stay at home and still be at home in history, too.

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.

Whitman & Dickinson is the first collection to bring together original essays by European and North American scholars directly linking the poetry and ideas of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. The essays present intersections between these great figures across several fields of study, rehearsing well-established topics from new perspectives, opening entirely new areas of investigation, and providing new information about Whitman’s and Dickinson’s lives, work, and reception. Essays included in this book cover the topics of mentoring influence on each poet, religion, the Civil War, phenomenology, the environment, humor, poetic structures of language, and Whitman’s and Dickinson’s twentieth- and twenty-first–century reception—including prolonged engagement with Adrienne Rich’s response to this “strange uncoupled couple” of poets who stand at the beginning of an American national poetic. Contributors Include: Marina Camboni Andrew Dorkin Vincent Dussol Betsy Erkkilä Ed Folsom Christine Gerhardt Jay Grossman Jennifer Leader Marianne Noble Cécile Roudeau Shira Wolosky

Dickinson knew the Bible well. She was profoundly aware of Christian theology and she was writing at a time when comparative religion was extremely popular. This book is the first to consider Dickinson's religious imagery outside the dynamic of her personal faith and doubt. It argues that religious myths and symbols, from the sun-god to the open tomb, are essential to understanding the similetic movement of Dickinson's poetry - the reach for a comparable, though not identical, experience in the struggles and wrongs of Abraham, Jacob and Moses, and the life, death and resurrection of Christ. Linda Freedman situates the poet within the context of American typology, interprets her alongside contemporary and modern theology and makes important connections to Shakespeare and the British Romantics. Dickinson emerges as a deeply troubled thinker who needs to be understood within both religious and Romantic traditions.

White Heat is the first book to portray the remarkable relationship between America's most beloved poet and the fiery abolitionist who first brought her work to the public. As the Civil War raged, an unlikely friendship was born between the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary figure who ran guns to Kansas and commanded the first Union regiment of black soldiers. When Dickinson sent Higginson four of her poems he realized he had encountered a wholly original genius; their intense correspondence continued for the next quarter century. In White Heat Brenda Wineapple tells an extraordinary story about poetry, politics, and love, one that sheds new light on her subjects and on the roiling America they shared.

Long untouched by contemporary events, ideas and environments, Emily Dickinson's writings have been the subject of intense historical research in recent years. This volume of thirty-three essays by leading scholars offers a comprehensive introduction to the contexts most important for the study of Dickinson's writings. While providing an overview of their topic, the essays also present groundbreaking research and original arguments, treating the poet's local environments, literary influences, social, cultural, political and intellectual contexts, and reception. A resource for scholars and students of American literature and poetry in English, the collection is an indispensable contribution to the study not only of Dickinson's writings but also of the contexts for poetic production and circulation more generally in the nineteenth-century United States.

Emily Dickinson is best known as an intensely private, even reclusive writer. Yet the way she has been mythologised has meant her work is often misunderstood. This introduction delves behind the myth to present a poet who was deeply engaged with the issues of her day. In a lucid and elegant style, the book places her life and work in the historical context of the Civil War, the suffrage movement, and the rapid industrialisation of the United States. Wendy Martin explores the ways in which Dickinson's personal struggles with romantic love, religious faith, friendship and community shape her poetry. The complex publication history of her works, as well as their reception, is teased out, and a guide to further reading is included. Dickinson emerges not only as one of America's finest poets, but also as a fiercely independent intellect and an original talent writing poetry far ahead of her time.