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Dickinson Criticism 1998
- Alfrey, Shawn. "Against Calvary: Emily Dickinson and the Sublime." The Emily Dickinson Journal 7.2 (1998): 48-64. More on Dickinson and the sublime; builds, like others of its type, on the work of Stonum.
- Arnold, Bill. Emily Dickinson's Secret Love: Mystery "Master" Behind Poems. Lake Worth, FL: PPB Press, 1998. Theory that the identity of Samuel Bowles as Dickinson's "Master" is hidden behind cryptic anagrams in the poetry.
- Atkinson, Colette J. "What cannot be hoarded or spent: Dickinson, Crane, and time." DAI 59-07: 2497A (1998). [UC-Irvine: James McMichael] Time is important to both poets; ED's work aims to forestall change.
- Bassett, Kenneth John. "Out of the east: Emily Dickinson and Lafcadio Hearn." MAI 37-02: 0435 (1998). Dickinson's imagined relation to the Orient set against Hearn's much realer one.
- Behnke, Kirstin. "Dickinson's Poetry in Translation: The Example of Paul Celan." In Grabher, et al., Handbook. 408-424. Close reading of Celan's "Der Tod, da ich nicht halten konnt" ("Because I could not stop for Death").
- Cameron, Sharon. "Dickinson's Fascicles." In Grabher, et al., Handbook. 138-160. How does a poem change when we read it not as a closed entity but as an element in a sequence? Much of the essence of Cameron's Choosing Not Choosing is in this essay.
- Clary, Bruce W. "Emily Dickinson's menagerie: the fascicles as poetic scrapbooks." DAI 59-05:1569A (1998) [Kansas State: Dean Hall] Contra Cameron (above), Clary concludes that "Dickinson never conceived of her fascicles as artistic wholes." Space was the main constraint on her composition, but the fascicles do form loose aesthetic groupings.
- Cooley, Carolyn Lindley. "With bolts of melody: the music of Emily Dickinson's poems and letters." DAI 59-11: 4142A [1998] [U of South Florida: Jack B. Moore] Music as influence on ED; her impact on composers; music as metaphor in her writing.
- Crumbley, Paul. "Dickinson's Dialogic Voice." In Grabher, et al., Handbook. 93-109. "Voice" is a way of getting at related issues in ED criticism: persona, punctuation, polyphonics, tradition, feminism.
- Dickie, Margaret. "Feminist Conceptions of Dickinson." In Grabher, et al., Handbook. 342-355. Sharp critical review of feminist readings that follow Adrienne Rich. Dickinson as rebellious or subversive--or as conventional; all approaches have been tried. Examines lesbian readings of the poet.
- Eberwein, Jane Donahue. "Dickinson's Local, Global, and Cosmic Perspectives." In Grabher, et al., Handbook. 27-43. Contexts for Dickinson's work, including Congregationalism, Amherst College, westward expansion, Jacksonian social upheaval, the Civil War, and New England skepticism.
- Farr, Judith. "Dickinson and the Visual Arts." In Grabher, et al., Handbook. 61-92. Connects Dickinson to Victorian visual aesthetics, including those of Frederick Church, Elihu Vedder, John Ruskin, and Thomas Cole.
- Finnerty, Páraic. "'No Matter -- now -- Sweet --But when I'm Earl': Dickinson's Shakespearean Cross-Dressing." The Emily Dickinson Journal 7.2 (1998): 65-94. Victorian readings of Shakespeare's cross-dressing characters stressed the heroine's progress to a more feminine identity; ED appropriates those plays and characters "to unsettle gender configuration." A sharp essay with notably clear readings of individual poems.
- Forman, Douglas Jon. "Emily Dickinson and the art of evasion." DAI 59-06: 2022A. 1998. [U of Florida; Richard Brantley] ED has been seen as a raw untutored poet. Forman argues that "the way Dickinson presented herself and the way she wrote combine to form a coherent strategy of dissent."
- Freeman, Margaret H. "A Cognitive Approach to Dickinson's Metaphors." In Grabher, et al., Handbook. 258-252. Attention to the abstract levels of signification in ED's metaphors can yield more insights than attempts to find a master figurative method in her work. Rigorous discussion of the logic of figurative language.
- Friedlander, Benjamin. "Auctions of the Mind: Emily Dickinson and Abolition." Arizona Quarterly 54.1 (Spring 1998): 1-26. A look at "Publication is the Auction" in the light of auction scenes in abolitionist literature.
- Grabher, Gudrun. "Dickinson's Lyrical Self." In Grabher, et al., Handbook. 224-239. Personae, performances, and transcendental "I's: in Dickinson studies.
- Hagenbüchle, Roland. "Dickinson and Literary Theory." In Grabher, et al., Handbook. 356-384. Dickinson as covered by the major theoretical approaches since the New Criticism.
- Heginbotham, Eleanor. "'Paradise fictitious': Dickinson's Milton." The Emily Dickinson Journal 7.1 (1998): 55-74. ED played off Paradise Lost in tricky ways; the poem resonates throughout her own treatment of Satan, Hell, and Eve. Excellent source / affinity study.
- Hogue, Cynthia. "'The Plucked String': Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and the Poetics of Select Defects." The Emily Dickinson Journal 7.1 (1998): 89-109. Affinities between the two poets.
- Hubbard, Melanie Anne. "Sacrament of the word: Emily Dickinson's material practice in the world of print." DAI 58-12: 4653A (1998). [Columbia: Ann Douglas] ED "refused print . . . because of the material resistance inherent in an historicizing and incarnational poetics." Her aesthetics was based on a radical deconstructing of transcendent works and authors.
- ---. "Dickinson's Advertising Flyers: Theorizing Materiality and the Work of Reading." The Emily Dickinson Journal 7.1 (1998): 27-54. ED wrote many fragments of language on the backs, sides, and margins of printed matter. Hubbard argues carefully that such works are not merely accidents, but make calculated oblique rejoinders to the texts that they overlay.
- Juhasz, Suzanne. "Materiality and the Poet." In Grabher, et al., Handbook. 427-439. Material contexts--physical embodiments of all kinds--and the issues that they raise for the study of Dickinson. Includes a review of Dickinson scholarship in the 1990s.
- Lanza, Carmela Delia. "'And Who Counts As "Us"?': Slipping in and out of Emily Dickinson and Myself." The Emily Dickinson Journal 7.1 (1998): 75-88. An personal inquiry into how to engage Dickinson's texts when one would quite probably have been the Other to the poet herself.
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- Messmer, Marietta. "Dickinson's Critical Reception." In Grabher, et al., Handbook. 299-322. A quick review of the periods covered by Lubbers, and then an in-depth look at Dickinson criticism since 1970. Very well-done review essay.
- Mitchell, Domhnall. "The Train, the Father, his Daughter, and Her Poem: A Reading of Emily Dickinson's 'I like to see it lap the Miles'." The Emily Dickinson Journal 7.1 (1998): 1-26. Edward Dickinson's close association with the Amherst railway that opened in the 1850s, and the impact of that association on ED's poetry. Revised and incorporated in Mitchell's Emily Dickinson (2000).
- ---. "Revising the Script: Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts." American Literature 70.4 (December 1998): 705-737. "It may well be that the informality and playfulness manifested by some of her texts is a function of their status as private, unpublished texts. Giving them a wider set of implications may be imposing on them a significance they were never meant to have." Revised and incorporated in Mitchell's Emily Dickinson (2000).
- Noble, Marianne. "The Revenge of Cato's Daughter: Dickinson's Masochism." The Emily Dickinson Journal 7.2 (1998): 22-47. The famous Portia, eager to wound herself to prove her loyalty to her husband Brutus, is an emblem for ED's complex use of female masochism. In "I started early, took my Dog," ED uses "masochistic fantasy in the service of a feminine erotic sublime." See also Smith (below).
- Orton, Stephen Noyes. "Banning the tribes: Emily Dickinson and the communitarian movement." DAI 59-07: 2508A (1998). [UNC-Chapel Hill: Townsend Ludington] Millenarian communitarians of the 19th century formed part of the context for ED's sense of community, despite the apparent conservatism of Amherst.
- Petrino, Elizabeth A. Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women's Verse in America, 1820-1885. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998. The affinities of Dickinson's verse with that of Lydia Sigourney, Frances Osgood, Helen Hunt Jackson, and others. The comparisons are usually to Dickinson's benefit.
- Pollak, Vivian R. "American Women Poets Reading Dickinson: The Example of Helen Hunt Jackson." In Grabher, et al., Handbook. 323-341. Women poets in particular have had a complicated need to remake Dickinson into foils for themselves. Hunt Jackson, for instance, constructed ED as the free singer without a social conscience, as foil for her own activist literary work.
- Porter, David. "Searching for Dickinson's Themes." In Grabher, et al., Handbook. 183-196. Such work is often desperate going, because the poet is "triumphantly unmanageable."
- Raab, Josef. "The Metapoetic Element in Dickinson." In Grabher, et al., Handbook. 273-295. Dickinson's poems about poetry, and her concept of the figure of the Poet.
- Salska, Agnieszka. "Dickinson's Letters." In Grabher, et al., Handbook. 163-180. Survey of Dickinson's correspondence, correspondents, and approaches to the study of her letters. "Letters prepared and created an audience for her poetry."
- Sewall, Richard. "The Continuing Presence of Emily Dickinson." In Grabher, et al., Handbook. 3-7. An early comment by a contemporary--New York banker Samuel Ward--sets the tone for the continuing sense of ED's strangeness that has persisted throughout the 20th century.
- Smith, Robert McClure. "Dickinson and the Masochistic Aesthetic." The Emily Dickinson Journal 7.2 (1998): 1-21. ED may have used masochistic fantasy to stage a subversion of gendered power relations. See also Noble (above).
- Stonum, Gary Lee. "Dickinson's Literary Background." In Grabher, et al., Handbook. 44-60. Following the definitive study by Jack Capps, Stonum both condenses and elaborates its findings. In particular, scholarship since Capps has stressed ED's debt to women writers--especially American women--more and more.
- Strait, Daniel Harrison. "The work of community: solitude, service, and experience in selected prose and poetry of George Herbert and Emily Dickinson." DAI 59-11: 4135A (1998). [Indiana U of Pennsylvania: Ronald Shafer] Both poets press wordplay into the service of spirituality.
- Uno Hiroko. "'Chemical Conviction': Dickinson, Hitchcock, and the Poetry of Science." The Emily Dickinson Journal 7.2 (1998): 95-111. The scientific lectures of Edward Hitchcock, Amherst educator of Dickinson's day, have great resonance for the ideas and language of her poetry.
- Vetcock, Jeffrey Joseph. "Reading between the lines: liminal consciousness in American literature." DAI 59-05: 1577A (1998). [U of Arizona: Edgar A. Dryden] ED attempts to harness "the liminal power from which a process-oriented conception of identity arises."
- Wagner, Diana, and Marcy Tanter. "New Dickinson Letter Clarifies Hale Correspondence." The Emily Dickinson Journal 7.1 (1998): 110-117. A newly discovered letter, though lacking salutation and date, appears to be part of ED's correspondence with Edward Everett Hale.
- Weisbuch, Robert. "Prisming Dickinson; or, Gathering Paradise by Letting Go." In Grabher, et al., Handbook. 197-223. "Don't point; don't pry; don't settle for one truth" when reading Dickinson.
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