num_pages: 232
description: What makes Emily Dickinson such a fascinating poet? Althoughshe left no personal poetics, she did define her own response to poetryas an immediate sensual "If I read a book [and] it makesmy whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. IfI feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know thatis poetry" (L. 342a). Presumably, her own poetry is most significantnot in what it communicates to a reader, but in what it does to a reader.Is the continued popular success of that poetry not conclusive evidenceof its capacity to elicit a similarly spontaneous, visceral response fromits readers? And is Dickinson's critical reception not the visible proofof the perpetuation of a powerful (and uncanny) reading seduction? Relocating Dickinson within her own culture reveals thegenesis of her rhetoric of seduction. But the consequences of the rhetorical"seduction" of antebellum readers still impact readers today.Why do critical studies of the poet so often identify her as the classicanalysand, the female hysteric? Because transference is frequently theengine of analysis, misshaping the reader's relationship with the textby introducing a past scene of seduction into a present interpretive context.
language: English
title: Seductions of Emily Dickinson
titlecomplete: Seductions of Emily Dickinson
ratings_count: 2
publisher: University Alabama Press