An examination of the past half-century's critical reassessments of one
of the most-studied American poets.
When Klaus Lubbers's meticulously detailed Emily Dickinson: The Critical
Revolution appeared in 1968, examining Dickinson criticism up to 1962, a
second revolution in Dickinson criticism was already gathering force, as
a new generation of scholars representing a wide spectrum of critical
perspectives began reassessing the poet's life and work. In the
intervening forty years, approximately 100 books about Dickinson and her
oeuvre have appeared, making her one of the most extensively studied
American poets in history. Approaching Emily Dickinson provides an
objective examination of that vast body of scholarship. It gives
detailed attention to the principal trends in Dickinson scholarship
during the past half-century: biographical studies; feminist
perspectives on the poet's life and work; rhetorical and stylistic
analyses; textual studies of the bound and unbound fascicles and the
so-called worksheet drafts; studies of Dickinson's social and cultural
milieu, including influences on her spirituality, and of her theories of
poetry. Fred White also examines Dickinson's artistic reception -- an
area of ever-growing fascination, not only among Dickinson scholars but
among artists, creative writers, dramatists, and musicians for whom
Dickinson's genius has proven to be a powerful conduit for insights into
the human condition. A fundamental research tool for both scholars and
students, Approaching Emily Dickinson also enables fruitful comparisons
both among and within the different critical and artistic perspectives.
Fred D. White is Professor of English at Santa Clara University. His
studies of Emily Dickinson have been published in College Literature and
in the Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson.
