Dickinson and Audience

An obsessively private writer, Emily Dickinson almost never submitted poems for publication, which she deemed "the Auction / of the Mind." Yet over a century of criticism has established what readers of various sensibilities describe as a shockingly intimate relation between text and audience, making the question of whom the poems address a crucial element in interpreting them. This volume of essays is the first book exclusively focused on Dickinson's relation to audience--from the relatively few persons who received many of the poems to that vast, unseen, yet somehow specific other that any literary work addresses. Dickinson's writings were influenced by her ambivalent attitude toward the conventions of the nineteenth-century literary marketplace and her desire to shape more intimate relations with chosen contemporaries. Still, her poems and letters engage modern readers and speak to the social and gendered politics of our own day. Thus this collection treats both the importance of Dickinson's personal friendships and the ways in which contemporary poetics continue to sustain the vitality of her writings. With contributions from Willis Buckingham, Karen Dandurand, Betsy Erkkila, Virginia Jackson, Charlotte Nekola, Martin Orzeck, David Porter, Robert Regan, Richard B. Sewall, Rob Smith, Stephanie A. Tingley, and Robert Weisbuch, the collection boasts a wide variety of critical approaches to the poet and her works--from traditional biographical and historical analyses to deconstructionist, feminist, and reader-response interpretations. It will interest not only scholars in these fields but also anyone who wants to gain insight into Dickinson's creative genius. " . . . an enlivening intersection of Dickinson scholarship and contemporary theory."-- Joanne Feit Diehl, University of California, Davis Martin Orzeck is Lecturer in English, University of Pennsylvania. Robert Weisbuch is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of English, Associate Vice-President for Research, and Associate Dean of the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, University of Michigan.