Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul's Society

by Barton Levi St Armand

Overview

The great American poet Emily Dickinson has long been seen as a figure isolated from her contemporaries and insulated from her surrounding culture. This book attempts to place her texts in their cultural contexts by exploring her attitude towards death, romance, the afterlife, God, nature and art. Using pertinent parallels, analogues, and glosses, it assesses her response to three levels of general culture: elite, popular, and folk. It attempts to find coherence in the entire canon of her poetry, and to reconstruct the lost sensibility that produced it. The author stresses Dickinson's visual acuity and the pictorial elements of her art, taking issue with recent criticism, which has focused on that art's supposed abstraction and 'scenelessness'. At its widest, the book is not only a cultural biography of Emily Dickinson as an American Victorian, but a biography of American Victorian culture itself, where Dickinson emerges as a 'Representative Woman'.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521339780
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/27/1986
Series:	Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture , #9
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	1,002,909
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.87(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; Abbreviations; Apologia: an art of assemblage; 1. Keepsakes: Mary Warner's scrapbook; 2. Dark parade: Dickinson, Sigourney, and the Victorian way of death; 3. Kindred spirits: Dickinson, Stowe, and the wars of romance; 4. Paradise deferred; Dickinson, Phelps, and the image of heaven; 5. American grotesque: Dickinson, God, and folk forms; 6. The earthly paradise: Dickinson, Ruskin, and Victorian aesthetics; 8. The art of peace: Dickinson, sunsets, and the sublime; Appendices; Notes; Index.