Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women's Verse in America, 1820-1885University Press of New England, 1998 - 240 pages Elizabeth A. Petrino places the Belle of Amherst within the context of other nineteenth-century women poets and examines the feminist implications of their work. Dickinson and contemporaries like Lydia Sigourney, Louisa May Alcott, and Helen Hunt Jackson developed in their writing a rhetoric of duplicity that enabled them to question conventional values but still maintain the propriety necessary to achieve publication. To demonstrate these strategies, Petrino examines both Dickinson's poetry and a range of "women's" genres, from the child elegy to the discourse of flowers. She also enlists contemporary magazines, unpublished professional correspondence, even gravestone inscriptions and posthumous paintings of children to explain what Petrino calls the most significant fact of Dickinson's literary biography, her decision not to publish. |
Contents
Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth | 19 |
Dickinson Sigourney | 53 |
Dickinson Epitaphs and | 96 |
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Aldrich American women writers Amherst argues Armand Barton Levi St bird Boston cemetery century characterization Cheryl Walker child elegies consolation contemporaries conventions convey critics Culture daisy dead death depicts Dickinson's poems Dobson domestic dying earth editors Emerson Emily Dickinson emotions epitaph expression feeling female poets feminine fiction floral dictionaries Frances Osgood Frances Sargent Osgood funerary Gilbert grave heaven Helen Hunt Jackson Higginson implies infant Judith Fetterley Language of Flowers Letters literary Lydia Sigourney lyric male moral mother mourners mourning nature nineteenth nineteenth-century American women pain Paula Bennett perhaps pious poet's poetic poets popular portrays reader reunion reveals role romantic rose Saxe Holm sentimental sentimental literature Sigourney's social sonnet soul speaker stanza suggests Sylvester Judd symbol tears Thomas Wentworth Higginson thought tion tradition University Press Victorian voice woman women's literature women's lives women's poetry women's verse York