Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson - Softcover

Dickinson, Emily

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812523385 ISBN 13: 9780812523386

Publisher: Tor Books, 1993

Synopsis

Emily Dickinson's Open Folios is a scholarly edition and aesthetic exploration of a group of forty late drafts and fragments hitherto known as the "Lord letters." The drafts are presented in facsimile form alongside typed transcriptions that reproduce as fully as possible the shock of script and startling array of visual details inscribed on the surfaces of the manuscripts. Marta L. Werner argues that a redefinition of the editorial enterprise is needed to approach the revelations of these writings - the details that have been all but erased by editorial interventions and print conventions in the twentieth century. Paradoxically, "un-editing" them allows a better understanding of the relationship between medium and messages. Werner's commentary forsakes the claims to comprehensiveness generally associated with scholarly narrative in favor of a series of speculative and fragmentary "close-ups" - a portrait in pieces. Finally, she proposes the acts of both reading and writing as visual poems. A crucial reference for Dickinson scholars, this book is also of primary importance to textual scholars, editorial theorists, and students of gender and cultural studies interested in the production, dissemination, and interpretation of works by women writers.

About this title

Review:

'No one can read these poems...without perceiving that he is not so much reading as being spoken to.' --Archibald MacLeish

About the Author:

Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886) lived in almost complete isolation from the outside world, but maintained many correspondences and read widely. Upon her death, Dickinson's family discovered 40 handbound volumes of her poems, which she had assembled herself.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0812523385
• ISBN 13: 9780812523386
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 10