Measures of Possibility: Emily Dickinson's ManuscriptsA study of the poet's distinctive compositional practices; 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 hand-written lyric and epistolary texts. Through systematic contextualization and cross-referencing, Mitchell provides the reader with |
Contents
Dickinson in Books | 19 |
Emily Dickinsons | 56 |
Dickinson and Genre | 131 |
Copyright | |
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Amherst College appear autograph beginning Bianchi blank space Books break capitals correspondence critics dash Dick Dickin Dickinson's letters Dickinson's manuscripts Dickinson's writing draft edge edition editors Emily Dickinson Journal end spaces envelope example fascicles folded follows Franklin Frost Library genre handwriting Hart and Smith Harvard College Harvard University Harvard University Press Helen Hunt Jackson Higginson horizontal Houghton Library iambic tetrameter iambic trimeter included indent inscription inson instance Johnson and Ward Jones Library Lavinia Letters of Emily lineation literary lowercase lyric Mabel Loomis Todd manuscript original material meaning meter narrow fellow nineteenth-century Open Me Carefully paragraph pattern pencil physical poem's Poems of Emily poet poetry prose punctuation quatrains reader references rhyme rows of writing Samuel Bowles script seems sent to Susan sequence significance Special Collections Stambovsky stanza suggests Susan Dickinson syllables tion transcription trimeter trochaic variants vertical visual William Hayes Ward words written