Dickinson Criticism 1995

Barnstone, Aliki Dora. "While rapture changed its dress: the development of Emily Dickinson's poetry." DAI 57.3 (1995): 1133A. [UC-Berkeley; James E.B. Breslin] Finds four stages in ED's work, centering on her developing engagement with Calvinism.

Blythe, Randy. "Dickinson's idiom: the signature complex." DAI 56.10 (1995): 3954A. [U of Alabama; Hank A. Lazer] A "post-postmodern" close reading for "stylistic signatures."

Costa, Catherine D. "'Discovering a golden dream': the female poetics of Emily Dickinson." DAI 56.5 (1995): 1776A. [CUNY: Gerhard Joseph] Some definition of "female poetics" and comparison of ED to George Eliot and Helen Hunt Jackson.

Dickie, Margaret. "Dickinson in Context." American Literary History 7 (1995): 320-333. Review-essay of several recent works in criticism and textual scholarship.

Franklin, R.W. "Emily Dickinson to Abiah Root: Ten Reconstructed Letters." The Emily Dickinson Journal 4.1 (1995): 1-43. These letters were transcribed by Mabel Todd in 1893/94, but do not survive in complete holographs.

Harris, Susan. "Illuminating the Eclipse: Dickinson's 'Representative' and the Marriage Narrative." The Emily Dickinson Journal 4.2 (1995): 44-61. Follows Dobson in seeing the personae in ED's poems as heavily inflected by Victorian constraints on women. Perhaps the greatest constraint was not to speak of the sexual side of marriage; ED violated that constraint in her "Wife" poems.

Hart, Ellen Louise. "The Elizabeth Whitney Putnam Manuscripts and New Strategies for Editing Emily Dickinson's Letters." The Emily Dickinson Journal 4.1 (1995): 44-74. Part of a correspondence between ED and Maria Whitney was transcribed and cut by Mabel Todd for the 1894 Letters, and considered mostly destroyed till the papers resurfaced at Harvard in 1976. Hart treats the letters diplomatically and reads the correspondence as a group in itself.

Henneberg, Sylvia. "Neither Lesbian Nor Straight: Multiple Eroticisms in Emily Dickinson's Love Poetry." The Emily Dickinson Journal 4.2 (1995): 1-19. Even fairly indeterminate readings by other critics try to fix the sexuality of speaker, recipient, and poet; Henneberg argues for a more truly indefinite practice.

Higgins, Anna Dunlap. "'A sudden feast': the domestic life and the poetry of Emily Dickinson's prose." DAI 56.11 (1995): 4396A. [Tennessee: Dorothy M. Sciura] "New-Historicist" study of domesticity and Dickinson's letters.

Oberhaus, Dorothy Huff. Emily Dickinson's Fascicles: Method and Meaning. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. ED's 40th fascicle is a conversion narrative in the structural form of a "garland." One of the most sustained exercises in reading individual fascicles as units of meaning, an approach pioneered by Miller (1968).

Werner, Marta L. Emily Dickinson's Open Folios. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.