Publication date:
30 April 2018Length of book:
186 pagesPublisher
Edward Everett RootISBN-13: 9781912224081
This internationally acclaimed study is now republished with a substantial new introduction by the author.
It is a work of extraordinary finesse which offers a full-length study which integrates the poet's homoeroticism into an interpretation of her poetry.
In this new edition Paula Bennett surveys other analysis by critics of Dickinson's work, and the conundrums these have raised.
Bennett illuminates Dickinson's desire to be a 'strong' woman poet against the background of her situation as a 19th-century woman. The author provides clear, incisive analyses of Dickinson's poetry, with a wide-angle view of the poet's cultural situation. She also gives sensitive discussion of Dickinson's sexual imagery.
It is a major contribution to our understanding of representations of female sexuality in Art and in literature.
"Paula Bennett's Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet manages, with extraordinary finesse and intelligence, to rehumanize the poet. This Dickinson is presented in a clear, jargon-free critical narrative that is at once serious, witty, committed, and down-to-earth. And it is indeed a superb surprise to see such an efficacious blend of intensive close readings with historical contextualizations." - Barton L. St. Armand, Brown University.
"In de-pathologizing Emily Dickinson, Bennett helps to de-pathologize our current critical notions of past (and present) feminine creativity. This is a sane book about a saner poet than perhaps we knew we had .t will be as much a corrective as a catalyst to other scholars of feminine poetry and it will be invaluable to teachers." - Anne Douglas, Columbia University.
"I find this a revealing, rewarding, and immensely readable book. It enlivens the way we read Dickinson as distinctively and happily a woman poet." - Jane Donahue Eberwein, Oakland University.