Emily Dickinson: Poetics in Context

Dickinson formulates her poetics in the context of popular manuscript practices, rhetoric, philosophy, and science in the American nineteenth century.

Melanie Hubbard (Author)

9781108491761, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 February 2020

268 pages, 37 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.7 cm, 0.57 kg

'This slim volume is packed with energy and ideas … offers many clear and concise explanations to assist newcomers. This volume belongs on the shelf of any serious reader of Dickinson.' J. W. Miller, Choice

This book re-assesses Dickinson's manuscripts, style, and statements to arrive at a historically appropriate conception of poetics. It compares her composition practices, such as variant generation and writing on already-marked scraps, with those of her peers in nineteenth-century American popular manuscript culture, tracing them to the pervasive influence of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, Hume's scepticism, and associationism in philosophy of mind and early neuroscience. The argument consults the archives and considers Dickinson's reading, in and out of school, in philosophy, rhetoric, and semiotic theory, as well as her training in inductive science and her familiarity with ideas about electricity, evolution, emotion, sympathy, and the brain. Combining close readings of poems with contextualizing information about contemporary conflicts in intellectual history, the book contends that Dickinson takes the making of poems to be her philosophical praxis. It depicts a Dickinson committed to thinking about the physical constitution of human consciousness and the historicity and materiality of one of its chief modes, language.

1. The manuscript variants: semiotic theories in conflict
2. Dwelling in the sign: associationist accounts of perception
3. Lightning in the mind: Dickinson's sympathetic poetics
4. 'Elate philosopher': thinking in the body
5. The 'relict of a friend' and associative inscription.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Poetry by individual poets [DCF], Poetry [DC]