Description
Book SynopsisPoses fundamental questions about reading habits we have come to take for granted. Featuring illustrations from Dickinson's manuscripts, this book makes a contribution to the study of Dickinson and of nineteenth-century American poetry. It also maps out the future for work in historical poetics and lyric theory.
Trade ReviewWinner of the 2006 Christian Gauss Award, Phi Beta Kappa Book Awards Winner of the 2005 Prize for a First Book, Modern Language Association "Beautifully written, witty, incisive, learned, savvy, generous, and generative, Dickinson's Misery has no contemporary peer, synthesizing as it does knowledge of a vast range of relevant philosophy, poetic theory, and poetry as Jackson's inquiry opens up territories none other has thought to explore."--Martha Nell Smith, American Literature "Jackson seeks to engage with the reader in exploring various theories of the lyric, and to find a way into a range of lyric genres (songs, notes, letters, elegies, valentines, verse) in order to consider them as alternatives to a singular idea of the lyric. The book is beautifully illustrated with a range of Dickinson material which allows the reader to appreciate the images of her writing as an essential element in 'reading' the past."--The Year's Work in English Studies (2007)
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xiii Abbreviations xvii Beforehand 1 Chapter One: Dickinson Undone 16 Bird-tracks 16 "When what they sung for ..." 26 Lyric Context 31 Hybrid Poems 38 Dickinson Unbound 45 The Archive 53 Chapter Two: Lyric Reading 68 "My Cricket" 68 Lyric Alienation 92 Lyric Theory 100 Against (Lyric) Theory 109 Chapter Three: Dickinson's Figure of Address 118 "The only poets" 118 Lyric Media 126 "The man who makes sheets of paper" 133 "You-there-I-here" 142 "The most pathetic thing I do" 158 Chapter Four: "Faith in Anatomy" 166 Achilles' Head 166 The Interpretant 179 "No Bird-yet rode in Ether--" 185 The Queen's Place 196 Chapter Five: Dickinson's Misery 204 "Misery, how fair" 204 "The Literature of Misery" 212 "This Chasm" 219 "And bore her safe away" 228 Conclusion 235 Notes 241 Selected Works Cited 275 Index 293
