Our Emily Dickinsons : American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Difference / Vivian R. Pollak.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pollak, Vivian R., author.

Series:

Haney Foundation series.

Haney Foundation Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886--Criticism and interpretation.

Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886--Influence.

Authors and readers--United States--History.

Women poets, American--20th century.

American poetry--Women authors--History and criticism.

Women and literature--United States--History.

Intimacy (Psychology) in literature.

Difference (Philosophy) in literature.

United States.

Genre:

History

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (366 pages) : illustrations, portraits.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia, Pa. : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2016]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

"For Vivian R. Pollak, Emily Dickinson's work is an extended meditation on the risks of social, psychological, and aesthetic difference that would be taken up by the generations of women poets who followed her. She situates Dickinson's originality in relation to her nineteenth-century audiences, including poet, novelist, and Indian rights activist Helen Hunt Jackson and her controversial first editor, Mabel Loomis Todd, and traces the emergence of competing versions of a brilliant but troubled Dickinson in the twentieth century, especially in the writings of Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, and Elizabeth Bishop. Pollak reveals the wide range of emotions exhibited by women poets toward Dickinson's achievement and chronicles how their attitudes toward her changed over time. She contends, however, that they consistently use Dickinson to clarify personal and professional battles of their own. Reading poems, letters, diaries, journals, interviews, drafts of published and unpublished work, and other historically specific primary sources, Pollak tracks nineteenth- and twentieth-century women poets' ambivalence toward a literary tradition that overvalued lyric's inwardness and undervalued the power of social connection. Our Emily Dickinsons places Dickinson's life and work within the context of larger debates about gender, sexuality, and literary authority in America and complicates the connections between creative expression, authorial biography, audience reception, and literary genealogy."--Online description

Contents:

Introduction. Dickinson and the demands of intimacy. Helen Hunt Jackson and Dickinson's personal publics

Mabel Loomis Todd and Dickinson's art of sincerity

"The wholesomeness of the life": Marianne Moore's unartificial Dickinson

Moore, Plath, Hughes, and "the literary life"

Plath's Dickinson: on not stopping for death

Elizabeth Bishop and the U.S.A. schools of writing

Dickinson and the demands of difference.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 267-336) and indexes.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed Feb. 24, 2017)

ISBN:

9780812293227

0812293223

OCLC:

965521740