Emily Dickinson has often been pictured as a sensitive but isolated poet--someone who published very little in her lifetime and limited herself to lyrics, considered to be the kind of poems most removed from social and political life. In recent years, scholars have challenged that view, and this book extends the discussion in valuable new directions.
Domhnall Mitchell begins by focusing on three historical phenomena--the railroad, the Dickinson homestead, and horticulture--and argues that poems about trains, home, and flowers engage with thei meanings in ways that extend beyond the confines of the aesthetic. He shows how Dickinson's poems and letters reveal the full complexity of her position as a woman situated within a larger social and economic class.
In the second half of the book, Mitchell considers the ideological, textual, and editorial implications of Dickinson's strategic privatization of her art. He relates the particular forms of her manuscripts' appearance, distribution, and collation to aspects of her social as well as her literary consciousness. In a chapter that is certain to provoke debate, he explores what it means to read individual poems and letters in manuscript versions rather than in printed editions. By paying close attention to textual evidence, he makes the case that various features of the manuscripts are actually matters of accident or immediate convenience rather than the visual markers of a new aestheic principle.
Mitchell closes by using the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to explore the contradictions of a "private" poetry that engages verbally in multiple areas of nineteenth-century life and discourse. By attending to the contemporaneous particularities of recurrent words and images, he demonstrates that Dickinson could stay at home and still be at home in history, too.
Domhnall Mitchell begins by focusing on three historical phenomena--the railroad, the Dickinson homestead, and horticulture--and argues that poems about trains, home, and flowers engage with thei meanings in ways that extend beyond the confines of the aesthetic. He shows how Dickinson's poems and letters reveal the full complexity of her position as a woman situated within a larger social and economic class.
In the second half of the book, Mitchell considers the ideological, textual, and editorial implications of Dickinson's strategic privatization of her art. He relates the particular forms of her manuscripts' appearance, distribution, and collation to aspects of her social as well as her literary consciousness. In a chapter that is certain to provoke debate, he explores what it means to read individual poems and letters in manuscript versions rather than in printed editions. By paying close attention to textual evidence, he makes the case that various features of the manuscripts are actually matters of accident or immediate convenience rather than the visual markers of a new aestheic principle.
Mitchell closes by using the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to explore the contradictions of a "private" poetry that engages verbally in multiple areas of nineteenth-century life and discourse. By attending to the contemporaneous particularities of recurrent words and images, he demonstrates that Dickinson could stay at home and still be at home in history, too.
There is much here that is new and important to Dickinson studies. This is a book that needs to be published and needs to be widely read. Mitchell's work is extraordinarily thorough and careful; it is based on knowledgeable readings of Dickinson's poems and letters as well as on unusual depth in cultural and historical study. . . . Mitchell's witty skepticism aimed at Dickinson, at nineteenth-century pieties, and at the pieties of late twentieth-century Dickinson studies provides a refreshing tone for the field.'—Cristanne Miller, coeditor of The Emily Dickinson Handbook
'A fresh, thought-provokng analysis of the best contextualization of the poet's work since the appearance of David S. Reynold's Beneath the American Renaissance.'—Choice
'Monarch of Perception is a formidable, often brilliant volume. It is a study imbued with the author's deep cultural and historical understanding, one that should be read by anyone with a serious interest in the genius of Emily Dickinson.'—Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin
'The reclusive Emily Dickinson and her poetry has been the thought-provoking subject of never-ending scrutiny. Mitchell here offers an exhaustive interpretation centered around the cultural (social, economic, political), religious, and biographical details of the poet's life--her home, her flowers, her publication (or lack thereof), her manuscripts and her handwriting. Minutely analyzing the effect of exterior forces on Dickinson's poetry, Mitchell concludes that the poet was more aware of outside realities than has been believed; she was, he claims, not so isolated from the facts of the world as scholars have previously suggested. This book may prove to be invaluable to Dickinson scholars, helping to illuminate this magnetic figure.'—Library Journal
'There is much to admire in Domhnall Mitchell's study of Dickinson, not the least of which is the book's tone. Judicious and cautious, the book frequently reminds its readers that it not seeking a literal correlation between historical events and Dickinson's verse but rather a demonstration of how such events inform the language of poetry. . . . The book is enlivened and enriched by its breadth of sources. . . . Current cultural images and thought also are tapped to shed light on the singular achievement of Dickinson's art. . . . The book's greatest contribution is its exploration of the way sin which Dickinson inhabited multiple and simultaneous identities.'—New England Quarterly
Domhnall Mitchell is professor of nineteenth-century American literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and co-editor of The International Reception of Emily Dickinson.
