A vice for voices : reading Emily Dickinson's correspondence / Marietta Messmer.
2001
PS1541.Z5 M38 2001 (Mapit)
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Details
Title
A vice for voices : reading Emily Dickinson's correspondence / Marietta Messmer.
Author
Messmer, Marietta.
ISBN
1558493069 hardcover
9781558493063 hardcover
9781558493063 hardcover
Publication Details
Amherst, Mass. : University of Massachusetts Press, c2001.
Language
English
Description
xi, 280 p. ; 24 cm.
Call Number
PS1541.Z5 M38 2001
Dewey Decimal Classification
811/.4
Summary
"Despite her reputation as a reclusive poet, Emily Dickinson wrote more than one thousand "letters to the world," engaging in lively epistolary conversations with close to one hundred correspondents. Although these letters have found many avid readers since they were first published in 1894, they have often been viewed as mere background material or vehicles for the writer's poems. This study offers a reevaluation of their status within Dickinson's canon, arguing for "correspondence" (rather than "poetry") as her central form of expression." "Concentrating on Dickinson's exchanges with childhood friends, as well as with Susan Gilbert Dickinson, Elizabeth Holland, Austin Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and the mysterious "Master." Marietta Messmer explores the poet's gradual shift from writing confessional letters to developing her unique "vice for voices" by creating fictionalized epistolary personae. While radically challenging nineteenth-century letter-writing conventions, these personae also subvert the narrowly circumscribed roles available to women at that time. Messmer shows how Dickinson used this double-voiced mode of correspondence to manipulate and interrogate a variety of male-dominated "authorized" literary, religious, and sociocultural discourses."--BOOK JACKET.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-259) and indexes.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Two Centuries of Critical Responses to Dickinson's Letters
The Context of Nineteenth-Century Epistolary Conventions
Editing Dickinson's Correspondence, 1894-1999
The "Female" World of Love and Duty
The "Male" World of Power and Poetry
Manipulating Multiple Voices
Conclusion: Dickinson's Letters to the World.
The Context of Nineteenth-Century Epistolary Conventions
Editing Dickinson's Correspondence, 1894-1999
The "Female" World of Love and Duty
The "Male" World of Power and Poetry
Manipulating Multiple Voices
Conclusion: Dickinson's Letters to the World.