Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre

by Sharon Cameron

Overview

Lyric Time offers a detailed critical reading of a particularly difficult poet, an analysis of the dominance of temporal structures and concerns in the body of her poetry, and finally, an important original contribution to a theory of the lyric.

Poised between analysis of Emily Dickinson's poetic texts and theoretical inquiry, Lyric Time suggests that the temporal problems of Dickinson's poems are frequently exaggerations of the features that distinguish the lyric as a genre. "It is precisely the distance some of Dickinson's poems go toward the far end of coherence, precisely the outlandishness of their extremity, that allows us to see, magnified, the fine workings of more conventional lyrics," writes Sharon Cameron.

Lyric Time is written for the literary audience at large—Dickinsonians, romanticists, theorists, anyone interested in American poetry, or in poetry at all, and especially anyone who admires a risky book that succeeds.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801821165
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	01/01/1979
Series:	Literature Series
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Sharon Cameron is professor of English at The Johns Hopkins University and is the author of The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: "The Angle of Landscape"
Chapter 1. Naming as History: Dickinson's Poems of Definition
Chapter 2. "A Loaded Gun": The Dialectic of Rage
Chapter 3. Et in Arcadia Ego: Representation, Deathm, and the Problem of Boundary
Chapter 4. The Mourning That Is Language
Chapter 5. Time and the Lyric
Notes
Index of Dickinson Poems Discussed
General Index