Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading

by Virginia Jackson

Overview

How do we know that Emily Dickinson wrote poems? How do we recognize a poem when we see one? In Dickinson's Misery, Virginia Jackson poses fundamental questions about reading habits we have come to take for granted. Because Dickinson's writing remained largely unpublished when she died in 1886, decisions about what it was that Dickinson wrote have been left to the editors, publishers, and critics who have brought Dickinson's work into public view. The familiar letters, notes on advertising fliers, verses on split-open envelopes, and collections of verses on personal stationery tied together with string have become the Dickinson poems celebrated since her death as exemplary lyrics.


Jackson makes the larger argument that the century and a half spanning the circulation of Dickinson's work tells the story of a shift in the publication, consumption, and interpretation of lyric poetry. This shift took the form of what this book calls the "lyricization of poetry," a set of print and pedagogical practices that collapsed the variety of poetic genres into lyric as a synonym for poetry.


Featuring many new illustrations from Dickinson's manuscripts, this book makes a major contribution to the study of Dickinson and of nineteenth-century American poetry. It maps out the future for new work in historical poetics and lyric theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691119915
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/25/2005
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Virginia Jackson is Associate Professor of English at New York University. She publishes on various aspects of nineteenth-century American poetic culture, on historical poetics, and on lyric theory.

Table of Contents

List 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

What People are Saying About This

Jonathan Culler

Dickinson's Misery stunningly combines scrupulous historical and theoretical explorations of Dickinson's bizarre poetic practices, and in so doing it opens the most fundamental questions about what critics and readers since Dickinson have come to call the "lyric." Future writing on poetry in nineteenth-century America and on the nature of lyric and lyrical reading will need to address Jackson's searching arguments.
— Jonathan Culler, Cornell University, author of "On Deconstruction"

Diana Fuss

Dickinson's Misery is our luxury. This rich and rewarding study uncovers intellectual value where no one thought to look for it before: in the envelopes, clippings, pictures, flowers, and dead insects that so often accompanied a Dickinson lyric. A lively, mischievous, and memorable book.
— Diana Fuss, Princeton, author of "The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them" and "Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference".

From the Publisher

Dickinson's Misery is our luxury. This rich and rewarding study uncovers intellectual value where no one thought to look for it before: in the envelopes, clippings, pictures, flowers, and dead insects that so often accompanied a Dickinson lyric. A lively, mischievous, and memorable book."—Diana Fuss, Princeton, author of The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them and Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference.

"Dickinson's Misery stunningly combines scrupulous historical and theoretical explorations of Dickinson's bizarre poetic practices, and in so doing it opens the most fundamental questions about what critics and readers since Dickinson have come to call the "lyric." Future writing on poetry in nineteenth-century America and on the nature of lyric and lyrical reading will need to address Jackson's searching arguments."—Jonathan Culler, Cornell University, author of On Deconstruction

"Who doubts that Emily Dickinson wrote lyric poems? Yet this turns out to be one of those truisms that dissolves in the face of simple attention. By showing how much we normalize the strange things that Dickinson wrote precisely by reading them as lyrics, Jackson has written a book that earns its subtitle: a theory of lyric reading. This is one of the most inventive and observant books yet written on Dickinson, but it is more than that: I know of no better study of the performative character of reading, nor of any book that does more to open our eyes to just how little we know about the range of genres and styles of reading in the past."—Michael Warner, Rutgers University

Michael Warner

Who doubts that Emily Dickinson wrote lyric poems? Yet this turns out to be one of those truisms that dissolves in the face of simple attention. By showing how much we normalize the strange things that Dickinson wrote precisely by reading them as lyrics, Jackson has written a book that earns its subtitle: a theory of lyric reading. This is one of the most inventive and observant books yet written on Dickinson, but it is more than that: I know of no better study of the performative character of reading, nor of any book that does more to open our eyes to just how little we know about the range of genres and styles of reading in the past.
— Michael Warner, Rutgers University

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the 2006 Christian Gauss Award, Phi Beta Kappa Book Awards

Winner of the 2005 Prize for a First Book, Modern Language Association

From the Publisher

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.

American Literature - Martha Nell Smith

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.

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