Measures of Possibility: Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts

Portada
Liverpool University Press, 2005 M01 1 - 425 páginas
Debates about editorial proprieties have been at the center of Emily Dickinson scholarship since the 1981 publication of the two-volume Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, edited by Ralph W. Franklin. Many critics have since investigated the possibility that autograph poems might have primacy over their printed versions, and it has been suggested that to read Dickinson in any standard typographic edition is effectively to read her in translation, at one remove from her actual practices. More specifically, it has been claimed that line arrangements, the shape of words and letters, and the particular angle of dashes are all potentially integral to any given poem's meaning, making a graphic contribution to its contents.

In Measures of Possibility, Domhnall Mitchell sets out to test the hypothesis of Dickinson's textual radicalism, and its consequences for readers, students, and teachers, by looking closely at features such as spacing, the physical direction of the writing, and letter-shapes in handwritten lyric and epistolary texts. Through systematic contextualization and cross-referencing, Mitchell provides the reader with a critical apparatus by which to measure the extent to which contemporary approaches to Dickinson's autograph procedures can reasonably be formulated as corresponding to the poet's own purposes.

Dentro del libro

Páginas seleccionadas

Contenido

Dickinson in Books
19
Emily Dickinsons
56
Dickinson and Genre
131
The Manuscript as Archive
191
Dickinson and Meter
223
Toward a Culture of Measurement in Manuscript Study
265
Derechos de autor

Otras ediciones - Ver todas

Términos y frases comunes

Acerca del autor (2005)

Domhnall Mitchell is professor of nineteenth-century American literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology at Trondheim. He was the recipient of a Houghton Library Fellowship from Harvard in 2001 and a Copeland Fellowship from Amherst College in 2002. Mitchell's other work includes Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception.

Información bibliográfica