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theses

This dissertation seeks to bridge the gap between literary and cultural approaches that has long been a hallmark of Dickinson criticism. By returning to the materials that Dickinson used when constructing her fascicles, to the cultural practices that she adopted and rejected in the process, and to the specifics of her writing and binding process, this dissertation argues that her manuscripts raise, instead of resolve, questions about genre and nineteenth-century poetics. The opening chapter undertakes a material analysis of the fascicles. By focusing not just on how texts are read, but on how they are made, it demonstrates that the fascicles are markedly different from the commonplace books, autograph albums, and scrapbooks into which nineteenth-century women ordinarily copied verses, as well as from homemade hymnbooks, diaries, and collections of sermons. The second chapter explores Dickinson's fascicles in relation to her letter-writing practices, analyzing where the two practices intersect and highlighting the ways in which Dickinson relied on the existence of both to rethink the formal structures and the rhetorical strategies of her poems. The third chapter explores Dickinson's poems on death, analyzing how the fascicle form undoes the expectation of closure that is intrinsic to the elegy proper and arguing that the structure of the fascicles as internally-divided clusters of poems that accumulate across the sheets allows Dickinson the latitude she needs to return to the scene and subject of mourning over and over again. The final chapter reads Dickinson's fascicles in relation to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, analyzing how the two poetic projects respond to a Wordsworthian notion of poetry that sutures the past and present together. Throughout, this dissertation treats Dickinson's writing practices as integral to her poetics, seeking to move beyond literary histories that focus on the poet's finished product to analyze the struggle with genre that is visible in the poet's process.

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 191-200).

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.2/rucore10001600001.ETD.17027

ETD_301

doi:10.7282/T3VX0GX2

ETD doctoral

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