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Reading in Time
Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century
Published by: University of Massachusetts Press
296 Pages, 6.12 x 9.25 x 1.00 in, 7 b&w illus.
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This book provides new information about Emily Dickinson as a writer and new ways of situating this poet in relation to nineteenth-century literary culture, examining how we read her poetry and how she was reading the poetry of her own day. Cristanne Miller argues both that Dickinson's poetry is formally far closer to the verse of her day than generally imagined and that Dickinson wrote, circulated, and retained poems differently before and after 1865. Many current conceptions of Dickinson are based on her late poetic practice. Such conceptions, Miller contends, are inaccurate for the time when she wrote the great majority of her poems.
Before 1865, Dickinson at least ambivalently considered publication, circulated relatively few poems, and saved almost everything she wrote in organized booklets. After this date, she wrote far fewer poems, circulated many poems without retaining them, and took less interest in formally preserving her work. Yet, Miller argues, even when circulating relatively few poems, Dickinson was vitally engaged with the literary and political culture of her day and, in effect, wrote to her contemporaries. Unlike previous accounts placing Dickinson in her era, Reading in Time demonstrates the extent to which formal properties of her poems borrow from the short-lined verse she read in schoolbooks, periodicals, and single-authored volumes. Miller presents Dickinson's writing in relation to contemporary experiments with the lyric, the ballad, and free verse, explores her responses to American Orientalism, presents the dramatic lyric as one of her preferred modes for responding to the Civil War, and gives us new ways to understand the patterns of her composition and practice of poetry.
Before 1865, Dickinson at least ambivalently considered publication, circulated relatively few poems, and saved almost everything she wrote in organized booklets. After this date, she wrote far fewer poems, circulated many poems without retaining them, and took less interest in formally preserving her work. Yet, Miller argues, even when circulating relatively few poems, Dickinson was vitally engaged with the literary and political culture of her day and, in effect, wrote to her contemporaries. Unlike previous accounts placing Dickinson in her era, Reading in Time demonstrates the extent to which formal properties of her poems borrow from the short-lined verse she read in schoolbooks, periodicals, and single-authored volumes. Miller presents Dickinson's writing in relation to contemporary experiments with the lyric, the ballad, and free verse, explores her responses to American Orientalism, presents the dramatic lyric as one of her preferred modes for responding to the Civil War, and gives us new ways to understand the patterns of her composition and practice of poetry.
Cristanne Miller is Edward H. Butler Professor of Literature and chair of the Department of English at the University of Buffalo. Her many books include Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar and The Emily Dickinson Handbook, which she coedited.For a podcast interview with Miller, produced by the University of Buffalo, please see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moDbSfz4x3o.
"An excellent book. . . . Anyone who cares about Dickinson, the lyric, or how one reads will be indebted to Miller's research, judgments, and clear-eyed sifting of current scholarship. She has done an enormous amount of work and has given us a poet of great subtlety and responsiveness."—Thomas Gardner, author of A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson
"[Miller's] study provides new approaches to many still-unanswered questions and will doubtlessly provoke further lively exchange among Dickinson scholars."—The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin
"While some readers may object that the chapters treating responses to Asia and the Civil War read like an argumentative swerve in the book as a whole, bringing discussion of form and history into the same project is sound methodology and yields fascinating insights. Miller's book offers an important contribution not only to multiple areas of Dickinson studies but also to nineteenth-century poetry studies as a whole. Reading Dickinson in relation to her rich and complex cultural context, Miller's study foregrounds both Dickinson's extraordinary gifts and the strength of her connections to the nineteenth century."—Legacy
"Reading in Time's signal achievement is to provide a new, thoroughly documented account of Dickinson's verse forms and practices within the broad world of English-language literature."—Nineteenth-Century Literature
"Reading in Time brings Cristanne Miller's exhaustive knowledge of Emily Dickinson's prosody to bear on the project of recreating, for a twenty-first-century academic audience, what her poems would have looked and sounded like to their first readers and hearers. . . . Miller's comprehensive knowledge of the material statistics of the poet's oeuvre leads to keen interventions in critical debate."—Emily Dickinson Journal
"Miller's Reading in Time is a polemical contribution to the ongoing argument over the artistic heart of a Dickinson poem. In part, her book is a gauntlet thrown down in front of Dickinson's Misery, Virginia Jackson's influential argument that Dickinson is not a lyric poet. . . . Miller disagrees."—American Literature
"Reading in Time makes important and broad claims against which any scholarship on Dickinson must be measured. The editor of the Emily Dickinson Journal, Miller has her finger on the pulse of scholarly production. . . . Miller's adept and revelatory reading of the interaction of formal and thematic aspects of Dickinson's poems is one of the joys of this study."—American Literary History
"With Reading in Time Cristanne Miller has succeeded in creating a framework for both periodizing and historicizing the poetry of Emily Dickinson."—SHARP News
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