Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet
Second edition, with new preface.
Paula Bennett
About this book
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.
About the author
Paula Bennett is Professor Emerita, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She is a specialist in nineteenth-century American women's poetry. She is the author of numerous books, including My Life a Loaded Gun: Female Creativity and Feminist Poetics and Poets in the Public Sphere: the Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800-1900. Her essays have appeared widely in journals and collections, including most recently in the Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic and The Cambridge History of 19th-Century American Women's Poetry.
Reviews
“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.
EER
Edward Everett Root Publishers Co. Ltd.