Emily Dickinson and Hymn Culture PDF Download

Author: Victoria N. Morgan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351940546
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Extending the critical discussion which has focused on the hymns of Isaac Watts as an influence on Emily Dickinson's poetry, this study brings to bear the hymnody of Dickinson's female forbears and contemporaries and considers Isaac Watts's position as a Dissenter for a fuller understanding of Dickinson's engagement with hymn culture. Victoria N. Morgan argues that the emphasis on autonomy in Watts, a quality connected to his position as a Dissenter, and the work of women hymnists, who sought to redefine God in ways more compatible with their own experience, posing a challenge to the hierarchical 'I-Thou' form of address found in traditional hymns, inspired Dickinson's adoption of hymnic forms. As she traces the powerful intersection of tradition and experience in Dickinson's poetry, Morgan shows Dickinson using the modes and motifs of hymn culture to manipulate the space between concept and experience-a space in which Dickinson challenges old ways of thinking and expresses her own innovative ideas on spirituality. Focusing on Dickinson's use of bee imagery and on her notions of religious design, Morgan situates the radical re-visioning of the divine found in Dickinson's 'alternative hymns' in the context of the poet's engagement with a community of hymn writers. In her use of the fluid imagery of flight and community as metaphors for the divine, Dickinson anticipates the ideas of feminist theologians who privilege community over hierarchy.

Author: Victoria N. Morgan
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754669425
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Bringing to bear the hymnody of Dickinson's female forbears and contemporaries and the Dissenting ideology found in Isaac Watts's hymns, this study offers a critical intervention in Dickinson's use of the hymn form. Dickinson's use of bee imagery and the re-visioned notions of religious design in her 'alternative hymns' show her engaging with a community of hymn writers in ways that anticipate the ideas of feminist theologians.

Author: Victoria N. Morgan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350380105
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Taking readers through the various stages of criticism of Emily Dickinson's poetry, this guide identifies both the essential critical texts and the key debates within them. The texts chosen for discussion represent the canonical readings which have typically shaped the area of Dickinson studies throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first century and provide a lens through which to view current critical trends. Chapters focus on style and meaning, gender and sexuality, history and race, religion and hymn culture, and performance and popular culture. In all, this guide serves as a user-friendly reference tool to the vast body of criticism on Dickinson to date by suggesting formative starting points and underlining essential critical highlights. It provides students and scholars of Dickinson with a sense of where these critical texts can be placed in relation to one another, as well as an understanding of pivotal moments within the history of reception of Dickinson from late nineteenth-century reviews up to some of the definitive critical interventions of the twenty-first century.

Author: Ann Beebe
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476676577
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
The public is familiar with the Emily Dickinson stereotype--an eccentric spinster in a white dress flitting about her father's house, hiding from visitors. But these associations are misguided and should be dismantled. This work aims to remove some of the distorted myths about Dickinson in order to clear a path to her poetry. The entries and short essays should open avenues of debate and individual critical analysis. This companion gives both instructors and readers multiple avenues for study. The entries and charts are intended to prompt ideas for classroom discussion and syllabus planning. Whether the reader is first encountering Dickinson's poems or returning to them, this book aims to inspire interpretative opportunities. The entries and charts make connections between Dickinson poems, ponder the significance of literary, artistic, historical, political or social contexts, and question the interpretations offered by others as they enter the never-ending debates between Dickinson scholars.

Author: Cristanne Miller
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
ISBN: 1558499512
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
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.

Author: Wendy Martin Ph.D.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440803323
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1077

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Book Description
An exciting new reference work that illuminates the beliefs, customs, events, material culture, and institutions that made up Emily Dickinson's world, giving users a glance at both Dickinson's life and times and the social history of America in the 19th century. While Emily Dickinson is one of the most widely studied American poets, some dimensions of her life and work are largely under-appreciated. This book provides the wider context necessary for a more complete understanding of Dickinson, presenting Dickinson's life and times as well as discussion of her poetry and letters. Prolific author and Dickinson expert Wendy Martin and 59 contributors address the relationship between Emily Dickinson's life and work and the larger world in which she lived. Examination of topics such as the history of Amherst, MA, and the Dickinson family's place in it; and the cultural, financial, political, legal, and religious practices of the day illuminate important dimensions of Dickinson's experiences and world for students, scholars, and general readers of this iconic poet's work.

Author: Cristanne Miller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198833938
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 657

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Book Description
"Includes new historical research that provides the most thorough nineteenth-century contextualization of Dickinson in relation to religion, race, gender, sexuality, age, class, ecology, and place, and historically grounded contexts for thinking about publication, media, education, and reading practices. Features original interpretations of Dickinson's compositional practices, reception, and influence including chapters on translations of Dickinson's work into visual arts, musical composition, international cultural practices, popular culture, and other languages. Considers Dickinson's composition and circulation of poems, her environmental ecology, her responses to the Civil War, and her relation to publishing and media." --

Author: I-Chun Wang
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527564789
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
This volume celebrates a fascinating variety of nonfiction known as life writing. This genre resonates quintessentially with the core of the humanities in its profoundly individual ways of fusing narrators with their narrative subjects. The book brings together scholars from around the world to explore the personal mapping of such narrators in the context of their cultural legacies. The hybrid fusions themselves form several subgenres that complement each other as they affirm human dignity and values and our need for human connection, felt at all times, but especially during times of globally met threats. The ever-expanding forms of hybridography here—along with testimonies, diaries, letters and journals—bear witness to how individuals have contrived to overcome their own traumatic sources of pain and suffering to discover joy and how to further map their pathways forward. The narratives not only communicate important information and aesthetic beauty needed to prolong troubled lives due to social anxiety or mental illness, but also challenge sociocultural issues involving stigma, migration, racial discrimination and persecution, human trafficking, and ecological concerns. Global in scope, personal in focus, and historically and culturally contextualized, the analyses provided here once again illustrate how much we have to learn from each other.

Author: Christopher N. Phillips
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421425939
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Understanding the culture of living with hymnbooks offers new insight into the histories of poetry, literacy, and religious devotion. It stands barely three inches high, a small brick of a book. The pages are skewed a bit, and evidence of a small handprint remains on the worn, cheap leather covers that don’t quite close. The book bears the marks of considerable use. But why—and for whom—was it made? Christopher N. Phillips’s The Hymnal is the first study to reconstruct the practices of reading and using hymnals, which were virtually everywhere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Isaac Watts invented a small, words-only hymnal at the dawn of the eighteenth century. For the next two hundred years, such hymnals were their owners’ constant companions at home, school, church, and in between. They were children's first books, slaves’ treasured heirlooms, and sources of devotional reading for much of the English-speaking world. Hymnals helped many people learn to memorize poetry and to read; they provided space to record family memories, pass notes in church, and carry everything from railroad tickets to holy cards to business letters. In communities as diverse as African Methodists, Reform Jews, Presbyterians, Methodists, Roman Catholics, and Unitarians, hymnals were integral to religious and literate life. An extended historical treatment of the hymn as a read text and media form, rather than a source used solely for singing, this book traces the lives people lived with hymnals, from obscure schoolchildren to Emily Dickinson. Readers will discover a wealth of connections between reading, education, poetry, and religion in Phillips’s lively accounts of hymnals and their readers.

Author: W. Clark Gilpin
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027106613X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Religion Around Emily Dickinson begins with a seeming paradox posed by Dickinson’s posthumously published works: while her poems and letters contain many explicitly religious themes and concepts, throughout her life she resisted joining her local church and rarely attended services. Prompted by this paradox, W. Clark Gilpin proposes, first, that understanding the religious aspect of the surrounding culture enhances our appreciation of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and, second, that her poetry casts light on features of religion in nineteenth-century America that might otherwise escape our attention. Religion, especially Protestant Christianity, was “around” Emily Dickinson not only in explicitly religious practices, literature, architecture, and ideas but also as an embedded influence on normative patterns of social organization in the era, including gender roles, education, and ideals of personal intimacy and fulfillment. Through her poetry, Dickinson imaginatively reshaped this richly textured religious inheritance to create her own personal perspective on what it might mean to be religious in the nineteenth century. The artistry of her poetry and the profundity of her thought have meant that this personal perspective proved to be far more than “merely” personal. Instead, Dickinson’s creative engagement with the religion around her has stimulated and challenged successive generations of readers in the United States and around the world.