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Zusatztext This collection will be useful to students as they embark on the arduous yet rewarding task of beginning to understand Emily Dickinson. These essays offer perspectives that encourage thought, demand close reading, and highlight important scholarship. Informationen zum Autor Vivian R. Pollak is Professor of English and Women and Gender Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is a past president of the Emily Dickinson International Society. Klappentext One of America's most celebrated women, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her own time and unknown to the public at large. Yet since the first publication of a limited selection of her poems in 1890, she has emerged as one of the most challenging and rewarding writers of all time.Born into a prosperous family in small town Amherst, Massachusetts, she had an above average education for a woman, attending a private high school and then Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, now Mount Holyoke College. Returning to Amherst to her loving family and her "feast" in the reading line, in the1850s she became increasingly solitary and after the Civil War she spent her life indoors. Despite her cooking and gardening and extensive correspondence, Dickinson's life was strikingly narrow in its social compass. Not so her mind, and on her death in 1886 her sister discovered an astonishingcache of close to eighteen hundred poems. Bitter family quarrels delayed the full publication of Dickinson's "letter to the World," but today her poetry is commonly anthologized and widely praised for its precision, its intensity, its depth and beauty. Dickinson's life and work, however, remain inimportant ways mysterious. The essays presented here, all of them previously unpublished, provide an overview of Dickinson studies at the start of the twenty-first century. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this collection represents the best of contemporary scholarship and points the way toward exciting newdirections for the future. The volume includes a biographical essay that covers some of the major turning points in the poet's life, especially those emphasized by her letters. Otheressays discuss Dickinson's religious beliefs, her response to the Civil War, her class-based politics, her place in atradition of American women's poetry, and the editing of her manuscripts. A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson concludes with a rich bibliographical essay Zusammenfassung An overview of Emily Dickinson studies at the start of the 21st century. The collection represents contemporary scholarship and points the way toward e directions. While locating the public Dickinson in relation to American political, social, and literary history, this volume also remains faithful to the private particulars of her career....
