Dickinson Unbound Paper, Process, Poetics [Paperback]

InDickinson Unbound, Alexandra Socarides takes readers on a journey through the actual steps and stages of Emily Dickinson's creative process. In chapters that deftly balance attention to manuscripts, readings of poems, and a consideration of literary and material culture, Socarides takes up each of the five major stages of Dickinson's writing career: copying poems onto folded sheets of stationery; inserting and embedding poems into correspondence; sewing sheets together to make fascicles; scattering loose sheets; and copying lines on often torn and discarded pieces of household paper. In so doing, Socarides reveals a Dickinsonian poetics starkly different from those regularly narrated by literary history. Here, Dickinson is transformed from an elusive poetic genius whose poems we have interpreted in a vacuum into an author who employed surprising (and, at times, surprisingly conventional) methods to wholly new effect.Dickinson Unboundgives us a Dickinson at once more accessible and more complex than previously imagined. As the first authoritative study of Dickinson's material and compositional methods, this book not only transforms our ways of reading Dickinson, but advocates for a critical methodology that insists on the study of manuscripts, composition, and material culture for poetry of the nineteenth century and thereafter.



Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1: Dickinson's Sheets
Chapter 2: Epistolary Practices and the Problem of Genre
Chapter 3: Sewing the Fascicles: Elegy, Consolation, and the Poetics of Interruption
Chapter 4: Dickinson's Sets and the Rejection of Sequence
Chapter 5: Methods of Unmaking: Dickinson's Late Drafts, Scraps, and Fragments
Afterword

Index

This is by far the best book on Dickinson I have read in a long time. It is an important and timely contribution to Dickinson studies, to the history of the book, to the history of reading, and a crucial l#²