A Kiss from Thermopylae

"This book contributes significantly to Emily Dickinson scholarship. There is nothing like it. In addition, Guthrie is superb at explaining accessibly what legal terms mean and what their implications are for everyday aspects of people's lives."—Cristanne Miller, author of Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century

"A Kiss from Thermopylae establishes beyond doubt the importance of legal reasoning to Dickinson's poetry, and it also contributes importantly to the value of the 'law and literature' subdiscipline."—Gary Stonum, author of The Dickinson Sublime

"Guthrie provides prodigious documentation, explains legal terms clearly, and fully explicates Dickinson's cultural milieu. In sum, this is a landmark study. Essential."—Choice

"The vibrancy and deftness of Guthrie's prose carries the reader through legal text books, case laws, biographical and cultural concerns, women together through reading so f her poems so compelling that it becomes easy to lose sight of how original many of his arguments are. . . . for example Guthrie convincingly argues for the importance of the notion of bankruptcy to Dickinson personally, who was keenly aware of the financial straits into which her grandfather Samuel drove the family, and also poetically, as a typological metaphor for Adam's fall and redemption."—Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin

"Illuminating. . . . Readers new to Dickinson will find that Guthrie provides an extremely clear procedure for logically penetrating the surfaces of many of Dickinson's most enigmatic poems, while experienced scholars will be surprised and delighted to discover how Dickinson's legal habit of thought adds new depths to even the most studied poems and letters."—Nineteenth-Century Literature

"An understanding of Dickinson's awareness of the law leads to new insights into her poetry, which engages with such themes as authoritarianism and individuality, and social responsibility and citizen rights."—American Literature