Rejecting the view that interprets Emily Dickinson exclusively as a proto-modernist poet, Joanne Dobson finds Dickinson rooted in the expressive assumptions of her contemporary women writers. By looking at Dickinson in the context of these writers, Dobson uncovers the effects of common grounding in a cultural ethos of femininity that mandated personal reticence. Combining literary history and contemporary feminist literary theory, this study posits a complex interaction of personal preferences and editorial policies that resulted in a community of expression with impact on women's writing and literary careers.

Rejecting the view that interprets Emily Dickinson exclusively as a proto-modernist poet, Joanne Dobson finds Dickinson rooted in the expressive assumptions of her contemporary women writers. By looking at Dickinson in the context of these writers, Dobson uncovers the effects of common grounding in a cultural ethos of femininity that mandated personal reticence. Combining literary history and contemporary feminist literary theory, this study posits a complex interaction of personal preferences and editorial policies that resulted in a community of expression with impact on women's writing and literary careers.

Scheming Women charts a trajectory of American female poetic speakers from within a heterosexual lyric framework to bisexual and lesbian subjects outside that pervasive frame. In close readings of Dickinson, Moore, H.D., and Rich, the author makes a new argument about the division that permeates their poetic speaking subjects. Postulating a revolutionary female subject, she extends Julia Kristeva's theory of poetic language through an intertextual approach, and shows that these relatively advantaged female poets destructure the very poetic power they are able to assert. Hogue concludes that in not reproducing positions of dominance and privilege indicative of larger cultural trends, these key poets exemplify important alternatives to class, race, and gender hierarchies—persuasively demonstrating the promise of what she terms an ethical feminist poetic practice.

An interdisciplinary examination of the poet, her milieu, and the ways she and her contemporaries freed their work from cultural limitations.

How do we know that Emily Dickinson wrote poems? How do we recognize a poem when we see one? In Dickinson's Misery, Virginia Jackson poses fundamental questions about reading habits we have come to take for granted. Because Dickinson's writing remained largely unpublished when she died in 1886, decisions about what it was that Dickinson wrote have been left to the editors, publishers, and critics who have brought Dickinson's work into public view. The familiar letters, notes on advertising fliers, verses on split-open envelopes, and collections of verses on personal stationery tied together with string have become the Dickinson poems celebrated since her death as exemplary lyrics. Jackson makes the larger argument that the century and a half spanning the circulation of Dickinson's work tells the story of a shift in the publication, consumption, and interpretation of lyric poetry. This shift took the form of what this book calls the "lyricization of poetry," a set of print and pedagogical practices that collapsed the variety of poetic genres into lyric as a synonym for poetry. Featuring many new illustrations from Dickinson's manuscripts, this book makes a major contribution to the study of Dickinson and of nineteenth-century American poetry. It maps out the future for new work in historical poetics and lyric theory.

With special attention to Emily Dickinson's growth into a poet, this literary biographical study charts Dickinson's hard-won brilliance as she worked, largely alone, to become the unique American woman writer of the nineteenth century.

Heginbotham's book focuses on Emily Dickinson's work as a deliberate writer and editor. The fascicles were forty small portfolios of her poems written between 1856 and 1864, composed on four to seven stationery sheets, folded, stacked, and sewn together with twine. What revelations might come from reading her poems in her own context? Are they simply "scrapbooks," as some claim, or are they evidence of conscious, canny editing? Read in their original places, each lyric becomes different-and more interesting-than when read in isolation. We cannot know why Dickinson compiled the books or what she thought of them, but we can observe what she left in them. What she left is visible only by noting the way the poem answers in a dialogue across the pages, the way lines spilling onto a second page introduce the next poem, the way openings suggest image clusters so that each book has its own network of concerns and language-not a story or philosophical preachment but an aesthetic wholeness. This book is the first to demonstrate that Dickinson's poetic and philosophical creativity is most startling when the reader observes the individual lyric in the poet's own, and only, context for them. For teacher, student, scholar, and poetry lover, Heginbotham creates an important new framework for understanding one of the most complex, clever, and profound U.S. poets.