Emily Dickinson and Victorian Poetry

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is best known for her elliptical, enigmatic and highly original poems and her extreme reclusiveness, culminating in her confinement in her father's house for the last twenty years of her life. It is only very recently that Dickinson scholarship has challenged this popular conception by demonstrating her innovative and daring interventions in the historical, social, cultural and literary world from which she apparently secluded herself. My project offers a new and original advancement on this work by examining her often provocative responses to her favourite British poets: the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson and George Eliot. It begins by combining analysis of Dickinson's epistolary references to these poets and the marginalia in her editions of their works with an exploration of the predominant ways in which these poets were read in nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture. Having reconstructed aspects of the cultural milieu in which Dickinson read these poets, the project then compares Dickinson's poems with those of her contemporaries as a means of delineating shared and common features of nineteenth-century Anglo-American poetry. For example, it examines similar recurring topics, tropes and image-clusters in their works and the comparable ways ideas about the function of poetry and the role of the poet shaped their authorial identities. By positioning Dickinson's work within this context, she emerges as a writer who did not make distinctions between British and American writers, nor promote American cultural nationalism as did her contemporaries, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Yet even these writers, like Dickinson, engaged with and admired the works of British poets, and, accordingly, Dickinson's attitude is more representative than it at first appears, deriving as it does from a transatlantic nineteenth-century culture in which writers were shared between ever-increasing Anglo-American communities of readers. This research counters approaches to nineteenth-century literature that ignore this transatlantic context and instead emphasise a cultural opposition between Britain and America, which is emergent in this period but has not yet become an overpowering reality.