Introduction

Summary

A Rapture as of Legacies —

Of introspective Mines —

(Fr1689; J1700)

IN THE FORTY YEARS SINCE Klaus Lubbers published his bibliographic survey Emily Dickinson: The Critical Revolution (1968), the number of academic studies of Dickinson and of literary and artistic creations inspired by her life and work has greatly exceeded that of the hundred-year period (1862–1962) covered by Lubbers, thus creating an urgent need for a new survey.

What has contributed to such a proliferation of Dickinson criticism and belletristic writing? I see three major factors. The first and most obvious is the steadily growing appreciation of Emily Dickinson's extraordinarily brilliant, innovative, complex artistry — an artistry that both extends and dismantles established notions of poetic possibility, genre boundaries, and even of the way language constructs meaning. The second is the availability of a number of reference tools published since 1955, without which contemporary Dickinson criticism could not have flourished. (See under the heading “Major Reference Tools Published since 1955,” below.) And the third and most pervasive influence on Dickinson scholarship has been feminist criticism, which arose in the mid-1970s and flourished in the 1980s and early 90s. Feminist criticism, of course, is multi-faceted; it engages other methods of critical inquiry — such as formalism, cultural criticism, psychoanalytic and textual criticism — and in so doing redefines the aims of those earlier or concurrent methods. Chapter 3 examines the spectrum of feminist critical approaches to Emily Dickinson.