Emily Dickinson: A User's Guide

Front Cover
Wiley, Apr 29, 2024 - Literary Criticism - 192 pages
Emily Dickinson, A User’s Guide presents a comprehensive introduction to the life and works of Emily Dickinson, Offers a richly appreciative biographical and critical introduction to America’s most widely admired woman poet
  • Written by a world-renowned Emily Dickinson scholar and American literary critic
  • Represents the only book that reads Dickinson through her manuscripts, the print editions of her work, and the major digital Dickinson editions published since 1994
  • The User’s Guide is a new kind of book for a new era of reading
  • Is the only book that is an introduction to the poet, her work, and her receptions among readers
  • Is the only book that presents new biography and textual discoveries that have just come to light in 2011
  •   Interprets Dickinson through the dynamic interchange between the reader’s sense of her life and her work
  • Draws on prominent critical views from the past century, including sentimental, modernist, new critical, psychological, feminist, queer, and postmodernist readings

About the author (2024)

Martha Nell Smith is Professor of English, Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, and Advance Professor at the University of Maryland.  Her numerous print publications include Companion to Emily Dickinson (2008); Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Dickinson (1998); Comic Power in Emily Dickinson (1993); and Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (1992).

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