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Emily Dickinson has often been pictured as a sensitive but isolated poet -- someone who published very little in her lifetime and limited herself to lyrics, considered to be the kind of poems most removed from social and political life. In recent years, scholars have challenged that view, and this ...

Emily Dickinson has often been pictured as a sensitive but isolated poet -- someone who published very little in her lifetime and limited herself to lyrics, considered to be the kind of poems most removed from social and political life. In recent years, scholars have challenged that view, and this book extends the discussion in valuable new directions.

Domhnall Mitchell begins by focusing on three historical phenomena -- the railroad, the Dickinson Homestead, and horticulture -- and argues that poems about trains, home, and flowers engage with their meanings in ways that extend beyond the confines of the aesthetic. He shows how Dickinson's poems and letters reveal the full complexity of her position as a woman situated within a larger social and economic class.

In the second half of the book, Mitchell considers the ideological, textual, and editorial implications of Dickinson's strategic privatization of her art. He relates the particular forms of her manuscripts' appearance, distribution, and collation,to aspects of her social as well as her literary consciousness. In a chapter that is certain to provoke debate, he explores what it means to read individual poems and letters in manuscript versions rather than in printed editions. By paying close attention to textual evidence, he makes the case that various features of the manuscripts are actually matters of accident or immediate convenience rather than the visual markers of a new aesthetic principle.

Mitchell closes by using the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to explore the contradictions of a "private" poetry that engages verbally in multiple areas of nineteenth-century life and discourse. By attending to the contemporaneousparticularities of recurrent words and images, he demonstrates that Dickinson could stay at home and still be at home in history too.

The vivid story of a tightly knit group of travelers--connoisseurs, collectors, scientists--who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving what they referred to as "Old Japan" and Old Japan's lasting influence on the culture of Gilded Age America. After the Civil War, the United States--as ...

The vivid story of a tightly knit group of travelers--connoisseurs, collectors, scientists--who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving what they referred to as "Old Japan" and Old Japan's lasting influence on the culture of Gilded Age America. After the Civil War, the United States--as cultural historian and critic Christopher Benfey argues--lost its philosophical moorings and looked eastward, to "Old" Japan and its seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance and perspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as a more cosmopolitan, modern state, transforming in the space of twenty-five years from a feudal backwater to an international power. It was the parallel rise of these two young nations that initiated some of the major power struggles--both military and economic--of the twentieth century. This "great wave" of historical and cultural reciprocity brought with it some larger-than-life personalities, and this is their story as well. The lure of unknown foreign cultures played out on both sides of the Pacific, in the lives of Herman Melville, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Adams, John La Farge, Kakuzo Okakura (the author of The Book of Tea), Isabelle Gardner, and Lafcadio Hearn, among others. The Great Wave is a beautifully rendered meditation on the subject of cultural identity and on the consequences--both good and bad--of cultural cross-pollonation. Above all, like Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, it proves that what important history does at its best is transform our worldview.