This collection features books and book contributions written by faculty in the Department of English at Fairfield University.
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Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto
Sonya Huber
Though it is foundational to the craft of writing, the concept of voice is a mystery to many authors, and teachers of writing do not have a good working definition of it for use in the classroom. Written to address the vague and problematic advice given to writers to “find their voice,” Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto recasts the term in the plural to give writers options, movement, and a way to understand the development of voice over time.
By redefining “voice,” Sonya Huber offers writers an opportunity not only to engage their voices but to understand and experience how developing their range of voices strengthens their writing. Weaving together in-depth discussions of various concepts of voice and stories from the author’s writing life, Voice First offers a personal view of struggles with voice as influenced and shaped by gender, place of origin, privilege, race, ethnicity, and other factors, reframing and updating the conversation for the twenty-first century. Each chapter includes writing prompts and explores a different element of voice, helping writers at all levels stretch their concept of voice and develop a repertoire of voices to summon. -
The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton
Emily J. Orlando
Bringing together leading voices from across the globe, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton represents state-of-the-art scholarship on the American writer Edith Wharton, once primarily known as a New York novelist.
Focusing on Wharton's extensive body of work and renaissance across 21st-century popular culture, chapters consider:
- Wharton in the context of queer studies, race studies, whiteness studies, age studies, disability studies, anthropological studies, and economics;
- Wharton's achievements in genres for which she deserves to be better known: poetry, drama, the short story, and non-fiction prose;
- Comparative studies with Christina Rossetti, Henry James, and Willa Cather;
- The places and cultures Wharton documented in her writing, including France, Greece, Italy, and Morocco;
- Wharton's work as a reader and writer and her intersections with film and the digital humanities.
Book-ended by Dale Bauer and Elaine Showalter, and with a foreword by the Director and senior staff at The Mount, Wharton's historic Massachusetts home, the Handbook underscores Wharton's lasting impact for our new Gilded Age. It is an indispensable resource for readers interested in Wharton and 19th- and 20th-century literature and culture. -
Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir of a Day
Sonya Huber
“I think we have to get to the real, to catch the facts we have, to hold on to what we see … in this time where lies are currency,” Sonya Huber writes in her book-length essay Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir of a Day. On the theory that naming the truths of quotidian experience can counter the dangerous power of lies, she carefully recounts two anxiety-fueled days one fall. On the first, she is arrested as part of a climate protest in Times Square. On the other, she must make it to her court appearance while also finding time to take her son to get his learner's permit. Paying equal attention to minor details, passing thoughts, and larger political concerns around activism and parenting in the Trump-era United States, Huber asks: How can one simultaneously be a good mother, a good worker, and a good citizen? As she reflects on the meaning of protest and on whiteness and other forms of privilege within political activism, Huber offers a wry, self-aware, and stirring testament to the everyday as a seedbed for meaningful change.
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Japanese American Internment: Prisoners in Their Own Land
Steven Otfinoski
Vivid storytelling brings World War II history to life and place readers in the shoes of the people who experienced the United States' Japanese internment camps. On the heels of Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. Through this order, more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent, many of them U.S. citizens, were forced to relocate to military camps for the duration of the war. Suspenseful, dramatic events unfold in chronological, interwoven stories from the different perspectives of people who experienced these events while they were happening. Narratives intertwine to create a breathless, "What's Next?" kind of read. Students gain a new perspective on historical figures as they learn about real people struggling to decide how best to act in a given moment.
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The Battle of Iwo Jima: Turning The Tide of War in the Pacific
Steven Otfinoski
Vivid storytelling brings World War II history to life and place readers in the shoes of the people who experienced one of the most pivotal battles in the Pacific War. On February 19, 1945, U.S. Marines landed on the island of tiny Iwo Jima. Facing rugged terrain and a deeply entrenched enemy, they embarked on a fierce, five-week battle to take the island and its airfields from the Imperial Japanese Army. Suspenseful, dramatic events unfold in chronological, interwoven stories from the different perspectives of people who experienced the battle while it was happening. Narratives intertwine to create a breathless, "What's Next?" kind of read. Students gain a new perspective on historical figures as they learn about real people struggling to decide how best to act in a given moment.
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Teaching through Challenges for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI)
Stephanie Storms, Sarah K. Donovan, Theodora P. Williams, Jay Rozgonyi, Betsy Bowen, Paula Gill Lopez, and Stephaney Morrison
Stephanie Burrell Storms and Jay Rozgonyi (with Kathi Rainville) are contributing authors, "From Awareness to Action: Creating PSAs to Promote EDI," Chapter 5.
Betsy Bowen is a contributing author, "Disturbing Voices: Literacy in the Archive and the Community," Chapter 6.
Paula Gill-Lopez is a contributing author, "Know Thyself: Implicit Bias and Mindfulness," Chapter 8.
Stephaney Morrison is a contributing author, "A Person-Centered Approach to Facilitate Students’ Social Advocacy," Chapter 11.
Colleges and universities cannot ignore the increasingly diverse student population in their classrooms, and how a focus on equity, diversity, and inclusion across disciplines trains students in the intercultural awareness they will need in competitive job markets. Yet while faculty may be aware of a need to understand EDI goals in relationship to their disciplines, and institutions may support EDI in theory, the onus of pedagogical training in EDI often falls on individual faculty. This book was written by faculty and administrators for educators who value the goals of EDI, and seek an intellectual community to help them develop their practice. Important to this book is an honest discussion of common challenges faculty may face when they engage in this difficult work, and effective strategies for addressing those challenges. The chapters are grouped according to six different themes: respect for divergent learning styles; inclusion and exclusion; technology and social action; affective considerations; reflection for critical consciousness; and safe spaces and resistance.
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Captain Sully's River Landing: The Hudson Hero of Flight 1549
Steven Otfinoski
Vivid storytelling brings an incredible story to life and place readers in the shoes of people who experienced the most successful ditching in aviation history - the emergency river landing of US Airways Flight 1549. On January 15, 2009, Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger was faced with disaster when his Airbus A320 airplane struck a flock of Canada geese shortly after taking off from New York's LaGuardia Airport. With no engine power and no airports close enough for a landing, Captain Sully had no choice but to ditch his craft in the Hudson River. Suspenseful, dramatic events unfold in chronological, interwoven stories from the different perspectives of people who experienced the event while it was happening. Narratives intertwine to create a breathless, "What's Next?" kind of read. Students gain a new perspective on historical figures as they learn about real people struggling to decide how best to act in a given moment.
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The Battle of the Alamo: Texans Under Siege
Steven Otfinoski
Vivid storytelling brings American history to life and place readers in the shoes of twelve people who experienced an iconic moment of U.S. history - the Battle of the Alamo. In early 1836, a small group of Texas volunteer soldiers occupied the Alamo fort and withstood a 13-day siege by a massive Mexican Army force. Suspenseful, dramatic events unfold in chronological, interwoven stories from the different perspectives of people who experienced the event while it was happening. Narratives intertwine to create a breathless, "What's Next?" kind of read. Students gain a new perspective on historical figures as they learn about real people struggling to decide how best to act in a given moment.
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Money, Commerce, and Economics in Late Medieval English Literature
Craig E. Bertolet and Robert Epstein
In addition to co-editing, Robert Epstein and Craig Bertolet are contributing authors, “Introduction: Greet Press at Market” and Robert Epstein is a contributing author, “Summoning Hunger: Polanyi, Piers Plowman, and the Labor Market”.
Book description:
This is the first collection of essays dedicated to the topics of money and economics in the English literature of the late Middle Ages. These essays explore ways that late medieval economic thought informs contemporary English texts and apply modern modes of economic analysis to medieval literature. In so doing, they read the importance and influence of historical records of practices as aids to contextualizing these texts. They also apply recent modes of economic history as a means to understand the questions the texts ask about economics, trade, and money. Collectively, these papers argue that both medieval and modern economic thought are key to valuable historical contextualization of medieval literary texts, but that this criticism can be advanced only if we also recognize the specificity of the economic and social conditions of late-medieval England.
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Chaucer's Gifts: Exchange and Value in the Canterbury Tales
Robert Epstein
Book description: Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the most celebrated literary work of medieval England, portrays the culture of the late Middle Ages as a deeply commercial environment, replete with commodities and dominated by market relationships. However, the market is not the only mode of exchange in Chaucer's world or in his poem. Chaucer's Gifts reveals the gift economy at work in the tales. Applying important recent advances in anthropological gift theory, it illuminates and explains this network of exchanges and obligations. Chaucer's Gifts argues that the world of the Canterbury Tales harbours deep commitments to reciprocity and obligation which are at odds with a purely commercial culture, and demonstrates how the market and commercial relations are not natural, eternal, or inevitable - an essential lesson if we are to understand Chaucer's world or our own.
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Composition, Rhetoric and Disciplinarity: Traces of the Past, Issues of the Moment, and Prospects for the Future
Rita Malenczyk, Susan Miller-Cochran, Elizabeth Wardle, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Rita Malenczyk, Neal Lerner, and Elizabeth H. Boquet
Elizabeth Boquet is a contributing author (with Rita Malencyzk and Neal Lerner), "’Bunch of Nice Friends’: Bruffee and the Making of Knowledge in Writing Program Administration."
Book description:
Edited by four nationally recognized leaders of composition scholarship, Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity asks a fundamental question: can Composition and Rhetoric, as a discipline, continue its historical commitment to pedagogy without sacrificing equal attention to other areas, such as research and theory? In response, contributors to the volume address disagreements about what it means to be called a discipline rather than a profession or a field; elucidate tensions over the defined breadth of Composition and Rhetoric; and consider the roles of research and responsibility as Composition and Rhetoric shifts from field to discipline. Outlining a field with a complex and unusual formation story, Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity employs several lenses for understanding disciplinarity—theory, history, labor, and pedagogy—and for teasing out the implications of disciplinarity for students, faculty, institutions, and Composition and Rhetoric itself. Collectively, the chapters speak to the intellectual and embodied history leading to this point; to questions about how disciplinarity is, and might be, understood, especially with regard to Composition and Rhetoric; to the curricular, conceptual, labor, and other sites of tension inherent in thinking about Composition and Rhetoric as a discipline; and to the implications of Composition and Rhetoric’s disciplinarity for the future.
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Pain woman takes your keys, and other essays from a nervous system
Sonya Huber
"Rate your pain on a scale of one to ten. What about on a scale of spicy to citrus? Is it more like a lava lamp or a mosaic? Pain, though a universal element of human experience, is dimly understood and sometimes barely managed. Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System is a collection of literary and experimental essays about living with chronic pain. Sonya Huber moves away from a linear narrative to step through the doorway into pain itself, into that strange, unbounded reality. Although the essays are personal in nature, this collection is not a record of the author's specific condition but an exploration that transcends pain's airless and constraining world and focuses on its edges from wild and widely ranging angles."--Publisher description.
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Running With Ghosts: A Memoir of Surviving Childhood Cancer
Matthew R. Tullis
In Running With Ghosts, author Matt Tullis reminds us that surviving childhood cancer can be a challenge as formidable as fighting for your life—and more enduring. The eldest of three sons born to a trucker and an office-worker, who lived in the idyllic village of Apple Creek, Ohio, Tullis was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia at age 15. In short order, the sports-mad teenager found himself on the cancer ward of Akron Children’s Hospital. One of the lucky ones, he walked out and kept on going.
Years later, as a journalist and college professor, Tullis began to wonder about all the friends and caregivers he’d left behind on 4-North. As his curiosity intensified, he decided to seek them out. Running With Ghosts is about friendship, loss, triumph, and closure: one man’s effort to understand more fully a life shaped by a random mutation in the code of his DNA.
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A companion to Virginia Woolf
Jessica Berman and Nels C. Pearson
Nels Pearson is a contributing author, "Woolf's Spatial Aesthetics and Postcolonial Critique".
Book description: A Companion to Virginia Woolf is a thorough examination of her life, work, and multiple contexts in 33 essays written by leading scholars in the field--Publisher description
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The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing
Celeste-Marie Bernier, Judie Newman, Matthew Pethers, and Elizabeth A. Petrino
Elizabeth Petrino is a contributing author, “‘A Chain of Correspondence’: Social Activism and Civic Values in the Letters of Lydia Sigourney,”.
Book description: This comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field—the history of letters and letter writing—is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature. Because of its mass literacy, population mobility, and extensive postal system, nineteenth-century America is a crucial site for the exploration of letters and their meanings, whether they be written by presidents and statesmen, scientists and philosophers, novelists and poets, feminists and reformers, immigrants, Native Americans, or African Americans. This book breaks new ground by mapping the voluminous correspondence of these figures and other important American writers and thinkers. Rather than treating the letter as a spontaneous private document, the contributors understand it as a self-conscious artefact, circulating between friends and strangers and across multiple genres in ways that both make and break social ties.
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Nowhere Near the Line: Pain and Possibility in Teaching and Writing
Elizabeth H. Boquet
“When I was starting College Presidents for Gun Safety, one of the concerns I heard was the idea that there were just too many issues on which to articulate an opinion. Where would it stop? Where would we draw the line? . . . In light of this latest tragedy, on a college campus that could have been any of ours, I would say: ‘We are nowhere near the line yet.’” (Lawrence Schall, quoted in “Tragedy at Umpqua,” by Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed, October 2, 2015)
In this short work, Elizabeth Boquet explores the line Lawrence Schall describes above, tracing the overlaps and intersections of a lifelong education around guns and violence, as a student, a teacher, a feminist, a daughter, a wife, a citizen and across the dislocations and relocations that are part of a life lived in and around school. Weaving narratives of family, the university classroom and administration, her husband’s work as a police officer, and her work with students and the Poetry for Peace effort that her writing center sponsors in the local schools, she recounts her efforts to respond to moments of violence with a pedagogy of peace. “Can we not acknowledge that our experiences with pain anywhere should render us more, not less, capable of responding to it everywhere?” she asks. “Compassion, it seems to me, is an infinitely renewable resource.”
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The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors
Nicole I. Caswell, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, Rebecca Jackson, and Elizabeth H. Boquet
Elizabeth Boquet is a contributing author, "Foreward."
Book description:
The first book-length empirical investigation of writing center directors’ labor, The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors presents a longitudinal qualitative study of the individual professional lives of nine new directors. Inspired by Kinkead and Harris’s Writing Centers in Context (1993), the authors adopt a case study approach to examine the labor these directors performed and the varied motivations for their labor, as well as the labor they ignored, deferred, or sidelined temporarily, whether or not they wanted to. The study shows directors engaged in various types of labor—everyday, disciplinary, and emotional—and reveals that labor is never restricted to a list of job responsibilities, although those play a role. Instead, labor is motivated and shaped by complex and unique combinations of requirements, expectations, values, perceived strengths, interests and desires, identities, and knowledge. The cases collectively distill how different institutions define writing and appropriate resources to writing instruction and support, informing the ongoing wider cultural debates about skills (writing and otherwise), the preparation of educators, the renewal/tenuring of educators, and administrative “bloat” in academe. The nine new directors discuss more than just their labor; they address their motivations, their sense of self, and their own thoughts about the work they do, facets of writing center director labor that other types of research or scholarship have up to now left invisible. The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors strikes a new path in scholarship on writing center administration and is essential reading for present and future writing center administrators and those who mentor them.
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Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism
Meredith L. Goldsmith and Emily J. Orlando
Emily Orlando is co-editor and a contributing author (with Meredith L. Goldsmith), "Introduction: Edith Wharton, A Citizen of the World," p.1-15.
Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism shows that Wharton was highly engaged with global issues of her time, due in part to her extensive travel abroad. Examining both her canonical and lesser-known works and including her art historical discoveries, her political writings, and her travel writing, the essays in this volume explore Wharton's diverse, complex, and sometimes problematic relationship to a cosmopolitan vision.-- Publisher's description.
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The Evolution of Hillary Rodham Clinton
Sonya Huber
Who is Hillary Clinton, beyond the right-wing smear campaign and the reputation of her husband? Sonya Huber’s short, accessible book takes a balanced look at Hillary, delving into the evolution of her image, her detractors and their attacks, and her policy decisions, offering an overview of the forces that have shaped her. From her role as Secretary of State to her commitment to women’s rights, her changing positions and charges of unreliability on issues of trade and the environment, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s political agenda has changed over time. Do these changes make her a reptilian “shape-shifter” or just a politician? Will she be responsive to a changing Democratic Party in America, and how will she govern as President of the United States? -- Publisher description.
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Irish Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett
Nels C. Pearson
Looking at the writing of three Irish expatriates who lived in Trieste, London, and Paris, Nels Pearson challenges conventional critical trends that view their work as either affirming Irish anti-colonial sentiment or embracing international identity. In reality, he argues, these writers work constantly back and forth between a sense of national belonging that remains incomplete and ideas of human universality tied to their new global environments. For these and many other Irish writers, national and international concerns do not conflict, but overlap--and the interplay between them motivates Irish modernism. Joyce's Ulysses strives to articulate the interdependence of an Irish identity and a universal perspective. Bowen's exiled, unrooted characters are never firmly rooted in the first place. And in Beckett, the unsettled origin is felt most keenly when it is abandoned for exile. These writers demonstrate the displacement felt by many Irish citizens in an ever-changing Ireland unsteadied by long and turbulent decolonization. Ultimately, their work displays a twofold struggle to pinpoint national identity while adapting to a fluid cosmopolitan world. -- Publisher description.
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ESL students in the public speaking classroom: A Guide for Instructors, 2nd edition.
Robbin Crabtree and David Alan Sapp
As American universities become increasingly diverse, instructors must know how to teach all their students effectively. ESL Students in the Public Speaking Classroom contains practical advice and specific techniques from experts Robbin Crabtree and David Sapp, help instructors to both understand linguistic diversity in the classroom, and to leverage it as a teaching asset. This guide contains helpful classroom activities at the end of each chapter, along with two new chapters (on technology and community-engaged public speaking) and an extensive annotated bibliography for further reading.
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The Remarkable Courtship of General Tom Thumb: A Novel
Nicholas Rinaldi
An irresistible novel set against the backdrop of the American Civil War and based on the real life of Tom Thumb, a young man only twenty-five inches tall, who became America’s first internationally recognized entertainer. By a writer whose previous work has been called “sprawling and elegant” (The New York Times Book Review), this novel weaves together a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at life during the Civil War and a moving tale of one misfit’s odyssey to find his place in the world. Discovered at age four by P.T. Barnum, Tom Thumb soon finds himself traveling internationally, sitting on the laps of the queens of Europe, and entertaining the masses. He meets Czar Nicholas and the King of Saxony, and is invited to the Tuilleries by Louis Philippe. After marrying Lavinia Warren, Tom and wife are hosted at the White House by President Lincoln. With the country at war, Tom and Lavinia set out on their honeymoon tour and witness firsthand the fracture between the states, the heroism of young soldiers, and the unbreakable spirit of the American people. Written in a voice that is both witty and lyrical, and with a colorful secondary cast including Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, P.T. Barnum, and notable figures of the period, this is an evocative, poignant imagining of one man’s story at a unique moment in American history. - Publisher description.
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Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Second EditionApproaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Second Edition
Peter W. Travis, Frank Grady, and Robert Epstein
Robert Epstein is a contributing author, “Students’ “Fredom” and the Franklin’s Tale.”
Book description: This second edition of Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales reflects the wide variety of contexts in which students encounter the poem and the diversity of perspectives and methods instructors bring to it. Perennial topics such as class, medieval marriage, genre, and tale order rub shoulders with considerations of violence, postcoloniality, masculinities, race, and food in the tales. The first section, "Materials," reviews available editions, scholarship, and audiovisual and electronic resources for studying The Canterbury Tales. In the second section, "Approaches," thirty-six essays discuss strategies for teaching Chaucer's language, for introducing theory in the classroom, for focusing on individual tales, and for using digital resources in the classroom. The multiplicity of approaches reflects the richness of Chaucer's work and the continuing excitement of each new generation's encounter with it.
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Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary and Cultural Practices
Mary DeJong and Elizabeth A. Petrino
Elizabeth Petrino is a contributing author, “‘Language of the Eye’: Communication and Sentimental Benevolence in Lydia Sigourney’s Poems and Essays about the Deaf", pp. 69-88.
Book description: Sentimentalism emerged in eighteenth-century Europe as a moral philosophy founded on the belief that individuals are able to form relationships and communities because they can, by an effort of the imagination, understand one another’s feelings. American authors of both sexes who accepted these views cultivated readers’ sympathy with others in order to promote self-improvement, motivate action to relieve suffering, reinforce social unity, and build national identity. Entwined with domesticity and imperialism and finding expression in literature and in public and private rituals, sentimentalism became America’s dominant ideology by the early nineteenth century. Sentimental writings and practices had political uses, some reformist and some repressive. They played major roles in the formation of bourgeois consciousness.
The first new collection of scholarly essays on American sentimentalism since 1999, this volume brings together ten recent studies, eight published here for the first time. The Introduction assesses the current state of sentimentalism studies; the Afterword reflects on sentimentalism as a liberal discourse central to contemporary political thought as well as literary studies. Other contributors, exploring topics characteristic of the field today, examine nineteenth-century authors’ treatments of education, grief, social inequalities, intimate relationships, and community.
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Emily Dickinson in Context
Eliza Richards and Elizabeth A. Petrino
Elizabeth Petrino is a contributing author, "British Romantic and Victorian Influences", pp 98-108.
Book description: Long untouched by contemporary events, ideas, and environments, Emily Dickinson's writings have been the subject of intense historical research in recent years. This volume of thirty-three essays by leading scholars offers a comprehensive introduction to the contexts most important for the study of Dickinson's writings. While providing an overview of their topic, the essays also present groundbreaking research and original arguments, treating the poet's local environments; literary influences; social, cultural, political, and intellectual contexts; and reception. A resource for scholars and students of American literature and poetry in English, the collection is an indispensable contribution to the study not only of Dickinson's writings but also of the contexts for poetic production and circulation more generally in the nineteenth-century United States.