Emily Dickinson (Radcliffe Biography Series) - Softcover

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 020116809X ISBN 13: 9780201168099

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 1988

Synopsis

Cynthia Griffin Wolff's brilliant literary biography of Emily Dickinson is the first to unravel the intricate relationship between her life and her poetry. It is a vivid portrait of the poet and her times as well as a fascinating interpretive study of the poems that will enable every reader to approach them with new understanding and delight.

About this title

About the Author:

Cynthia Griffin Wolff holds the Class of 1922 Professorship of the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton and Samuel Richardson and the Eighteenth Century Puritan Character.

From Library Journal:

This is a dense, extended study of Dickinson's life and poetry, the first attempting this perilous joining since Thomas Johnson's Emily Dickinson (1955). Wolff, expanding on Tate ("New England Culture and Emily Dickinson," 1932), deflects the peril by positing that the passion in the poetry arises from Dickinson's lifelong wrestling with an abandoning, vengeful God. This single perspective illuminates poetry Christian in idea or imagery but convolutes when applied to nonfaith poems. Biographical revelations arise from the reconsideration of known data, yielding a complex portrait and some plausible conjectures in a context profuse with family, ancestry, and social history. The rich interweaving of times, life, mind, and letters makes this a formidable addition to the canon of enduring Dickinson studies. Domenica Paterno, Lehman Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 020116809X
• ISBN 13: 9780201168099
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 656