Download or read book Gender Identities in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson and in the Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass written by Katrin Gischler and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2007-12 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 65%, University of Reading (Department of English and American Literature), course: Writing America 2, 11 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Before we deal with gender identity it is first of all important to understand the definition of gender. The Oxford Companion to African-American Literature explains it as follows: "Gender is different from sexuality [sic!]. Sexuality concerns physical and biological differences that distinguish males from females. Cultures construct differences in gender. These social constructions attach themselves to behaviors, expectations, roles, representations, and sometimes to values and beliefs that are specific to either men and women." In this following paper I'm going to analyse the different gender identities appearing in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and the autobiography of Frederick Douglass.1 My main focus is concentrated on the use and description of gender in both genres. How are gender identities characterized and how do we get to know them? Which gender does Dickinson use in the chosen poems and how are their identities constructed? Referring to Douglass it is interesting to look at how he constitutes himself as an identity. Referring to Emily Dickinson, I chose several poems, like "I'm "wife" - I've finished that-," "I felt my life with both hands," "A Wife- at Daybreak I shall be," "I was the slightest in the House-" and "I tie my Hat." Gender Identities in Emily Dickinson's Poetry In the lyric poem there is for the most part no description of who is speaking, no embodiment, no development, no introduced "character." For example, Dickinson's various personae or self-positionings as "Earl," "Wife" or "Queen" are known either only by the tone and manner of the text or by self-naming within the poem's text. Dickinson's speaker exclaims "A Wife - at Daybreak- I shall be-" but the poem provides no corroboration of th

Download or read book Gender Identity in the Slave Narratives by Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass written by Julia Knoth and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 29 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Kassel (Anglistik/Amerikanistik Literaturwissenschaft), course: American Renaissance, language: English, abstract: Douglass's and Jacob's slave narratives deal with the reconstruction of identity. The recreation of Frederick Douglass's own identity is seen as an “argument for an end to slavery's denial of individuality and creativity”. This process of reconstructing identity is closely connected with the depiction of gender. Thus, the main focus of this term paper is placed on the formation of gender identity in the two slave narratives. The concept of gender can be defined as “the relationship between biological sex and behavior”. The leading question of this paper is: How does the image of black femininity and black masculinity portrayed in the two slave narratives correspond with the concept of womanhood and manhood prevailing at the time? In the course of this paper I will attempt to show that the two slave narratives serve as an example of individual self-fashioning, attempting to portray themselves as truly masculine or feminine and conforming to gender roles, at the same time reinventing these prevailing concepts. Society expects people to behave according to norms and values typical for a certain time. Thus, the first chapter gives an overview of gender stereotypes in the 19th century, which will subsequently be linked to the slave narratives. Creating a female identity as a slave suggests to include the category of sexuality, as female slaves often suffered from oppression and sexual abuse. However, this only offers a limited view and there are other significant dimensions connected to female identity. Therefore, Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl will also be analyzed in terms of motherhood and interdependence. The creation of male identity in Douglass's Narrative will then be analyzed comparatively by looking at his desire for freedom and how he copes with feminization and dehumanization of male slaves, his fight for independence, and his isolation in reference to his family and other slaves.

Download or read book Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries written by Elizabeth A. Petrino and published by UPNE. This book was released on 1998 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An interdisciplinary examination of the poet, her milieu, and the ways she and her contemporaries freed their work from cultural limitations.

Download or read book Emily Dickinson written by Joan Kirkby and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on letters and poems, this book examines the life and major work of Emily Dickinson with special emphasis on the poet's fascination with language, gender, the limit states of sexuality and death, as well as her celebration of earthly life.

Download or read book Emily Dickinson a Poet s Grammar written by Cristanne Miller and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the roots of Dickinson's unusual, compressed, ungrammatical, and richly ambiguous style of poetry.

Download or read book Emily Dickinson written by Paula Bennett and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Study and analysis of Emily Dickinson's poetry with a sensitive discussion of its sexual imagery.

Download or read book The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History written by Joan Shelley Rubin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 1551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History brings together in one two-volume set the record of the nation's values, aspirations, anxieties, and beliefs as expressed in both everyday life and formal bodies of thought. Over the past twenty years, the field of cultural history has moved to the center of American historical studies, and has come to encompass the experiences of ordinary citizens in such arenas as reading and religious practice as well as the accomplishments of prominent artists and writers. Some of the most imaginative scholarship in recent years has emerged from this burgeoning field. The scope of the volume reflects that development: the encyclopedia incorporates popular entertainment ranging from minstrel shows to video games, middlebrow ventures like Chautauqua lectures and book clubs, and preoccupations such as "Perfectionism" and "Wellness" that have shaped Americans' behavior at various points in their past and that continue to influence attitudes in the present. The volumes also make available recent scholarly insights into the writings of political scientists, philosophers, feminist theorists, social reformers, and other thinkers whose works have furnished the underpinnings of Americans' civic activities and personal concerns. Anyone wishing to understand the hearts and minds of the inhabitants of the United States from the early days of settlement to the twenty-first century will find the encyclopedia invaluable.

Download or read book A Loaded Gun written by Jessie E. Hawkes and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis examines how Emily Dickinson approached men and masculinity in her poems and how she exercised her own power as a female poet in a male-dominated society. Throughout her poetry, Dickinson explored the dynamics of masculinity by employing the voices of multiple narrators, primarily men, objects, and the empowered woman. She used these variant perspectives to highlight the discrepancies of treatment between men and women and subtly undercut the prevalent masculine hierarchy. To complicate Dickinson's approach, she entertained narratives that sought male approval while simultaneously fighting male dominance. Dickinson was able to overcome the assumed culture of masculinity in her poetry by ascribing power to the craft of writing, which was evident in her personal life and her poetry. By making gender roles appear flexible , adjusting the voice of the narrator, and depicting women as dominant, Dickinson elevated the status of women in her poetry and identified the injustices that exist between the sexes. In her poetry, women gained status through self-mastery, wit, flirtation, questioning, sexual forwardness, and most particularly, mastery of language.

Download or read book Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory written by Mary Loeffelholz and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry written by the gifted recluse Emily Dickinson has remained fresh and enigmatic for longer than works by her male Transcendentalist counterparts. Here Mary Loeffelholz reads Dickinson's poetry and career in the double context of nineteenth-century literary tradition and twentieth-century feminist literary theory. "Mary Loeffelholz has written a book that actually performs what it promises. . . . It illuminates our understanding of Emily Dickinson with readings both elegant and useful, and as importantly suggests modified direction for feminist-psychoanalytic theory." -- Diana Hume George, author of Oedipus Anne: The Poetry of Anne Sexton

Download or read book Approaching Emily Dickinson written by Fred D. White and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2008 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book gives detailed attention to the principal trends in Dickinson scholarship during the past half-century: rhetorical and stylistic analysis of the poems and letters; biographical studies informed by theories of gender, sexuality, and by medical history; feminist studies of the poet's life and work; textual studies of the bound and unbound fascicles and the so-called worksheet drafts (or "scraps"); new assessments of the poet's social and cultural milieu, including influences on her spiritual sensibility; and of her theories of poetry, including lyricism."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Our Emily Dickinsons written by Vivian R. Pollak and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our Emily Dickinsons situates Dickinson's life and work within larger debates about gender, sexuality, and literary authority in America. Examining Dickinson's influence on Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop and others, Vivian R. Pollak complicates the connection between authorial biography and poetry that endures.

Download or read book Emily Dickinson s Life and Poetry written by Kathrin Haubold and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2011-03 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1 (A), University of Frankfurt (Main) (Institute for England and American Studies), course: Emily Dickenson, language: English, abstract: We know much of Dickinson ́s life through her correspondences. She maintained a lifelong correspondence with Susan Dickinson, even though they were next-door neighbors. This correspondence, preserved by Susan, is the source for many of the poet ́s manuscripts. But Emily Dickinson also corresponded with school friends, with her cousins Fanny and Loo Norcross, and with several people of letters, including Samuel Bowles, Dr. and Mrs. J.G. Holland, T.W. Higginson, and Helen Hunt Jackson. The central events, then, of Dickinson ́s life are those that are central to the life of most writers: she wrote. She compiled a manuscript recorded of 1.775 poems, along with many letters. In or around 1858 she began to keep manuscript books of her poetry, the "fascicles", hand-produced and hand-bound. In the early 1860s she produced hundreds of poems each year. In 1864 and 1865, failing eyesight, which impelled her to make two extended visits to Cambridge, Massachusette for medical treatment, slowed her production of manuscipt books. But her production of manuscripts continued at a slower pace until her last illness in 1885-86. Though she wrote hundreds of poems, Dickinson never published a book of poetry. The few poems published during her lifetime were anonymous. The reasons why she never published are still unclear. A myth promoted by William Luce ́s play The Belle of Amherst (1976) is that Higginson discouraged her writing. However, it is propably not the case that Dickinson met with rejection from the literary world. For one thing, Higginson was instrumental in getting her poetry published soon after her death, suggesting, that her reluctance and not his disapproval was the barrier to him doing this earlier. Also, both Bowles and Hunt Jackson arranged for anonymou

Download or read book Emily Dickinson Poetics in Context written by Melanie Hubbard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book re-assesses Dickinson's manuscripts, style, and statements to arrive at a historically appropriate conception of poetics. It compares her composition practices, such as variant generation and writing on already-marked scraps, with those of her peers in nineteenth-century American popular manuscript culture, tracing them to the pervasive influence of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, Hume's scepticism, and associationism in philosophy of mind and early neuroscience. The argument consults the archives and considers Dickinson's reading, in and out of school, in philosophy, rhetoric, and semiotic theory, as well as her training in inductive science and her familiarity with ideas about electricity, evolution, emotion, sympathy, and the brain. Combining close readings of poems with contextualizing information about contemporary conflicts in intellectual history, the book contends that Dickinson takes the making of poems to be her philosophical praxis. It depicts a Dickinson committed to thinking about the physical constitution of human consciousness and the historicity and materiality of one of its chief modes, language.

Download or read book Emily Dickinson written by Suzanne Juhasz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The focus of this title, first published in 1989, begins with Dickinson’s poems themselves and the ways in which we read them. There are three readings for each of the six poems under consideration that are both complementary and provocative. The selected poems show Dickinson speaking of herself in increasingly wider relationships – to love, the outside world, death and eternity – and are grouped together to reveal her overlapping attitudes and feelings. Other topics discussed range from general epistemological and critical considerations to the poet’s self-identification and the process of reading her poetry as a feminist critic. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

Download or read book The Emily Dickinson Handbook written by Gudrun Grabher (ed) and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: HERE FOR THE first time, students of Emily Dickinson can find a single source of accurate, up-to-date information on the poet's life and works, her letters and manuscripts, the cultural climate of her times, her reception and influence, and the current state of Dickinson scholarship. Written by a distinguished group of contributors from the United States and abroad, the twenty-two essays in this volume reflect the many facets of the poet's oeuvre, as well as the principal trends in Dickinson studies. Topics include Richard Sewall on Dickinson's life, Agnieszka Salska on her letters, David Porter on themes (or the lack of them) in the poetry, Judith Farr on Dickinson and the visual arts, and Roland Hagenbuchle on the poet and literary theory. Contributions from newer scholars range from Kerstin Behnke on translation and Martha Ackmann on biography to Marietta Messmer on the poet's critical reception and Paul Crumbley on her dialogic voice. Each essay presents a historical overview of the subject under scrutiny and offers detailed discussion of the most relevant issues. The scholarship is original and exemplary, in some cases providing access to little studied areas (for example, Jonnie Guerra's essay on adaptations of the poems in the arts) and in others providing an overview of hotly debated areas of study (Suzanne Juhasz on new directions in Dickinson study, or Martha Nell Smith on editing the poems). Unlike encyclopedic entries, each essay also reflects the contributor's distinct and at times controversial point of view . As a result, the essays will prove useful not just to beginning students, but also to established scholars looking for a review of areas of Dickinson studieswith which they are less familiar.

Download or read book My Wars Are Laid Away in Books written by Alfred Habegger and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2002-09-17 with total page 802 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emily Dickinson, probably the most loved and certainly the greatest of American poets, continues to be seen as the most elusive. One reason she has become a timeless icon of mystery for many readers is that her developmental phases have not been clarified. In this exhaustively researched biography, Alfred Habegger presents the first thorough account of Dickinson’s growth–a richly contextualized story of genius in the process of formation and then in the act of overwhelming production. Building on the work of former and contemporary scholars, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books brings to light a wide range of new material from legal archives, congregational records, contemporary women's writing, and previously unpublished fragments of Dickinson’s own letters. Habegger discovers the best available answers to the pressing questions about the poet: Was she lesbian? Who was the person she evidently loved? Why did she refuse to publish and why was this refusal so integral an aspect of her work? Habegger also illuminates many of the essential connection sin Dickinson’s story: between the decay of doctrinal Protestantism and the emergence of her riddling lyric vision; between her father’s political isolation after the Whig Party’s collapse and her private poetic vocation; between her frustrated quest for human intimacy and the tuning of her uniquely seductive voice. The definitive treatment of Dickinson’s life and times, and of her poetic development, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books shows how she could be both a woman of her era and a timeless creator. Although many aspects of her life and work will always elude scrutiny, her living, changing profile at least comes into focus in this meticulous and magisterial biography.

Download or read book Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson written by Suzanne Juhasz and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While feminist criticism has come only recently to the study of Emily Dickinson, it seems inevitable that Dickinson -- the greatest woman poet in the English language -- should be viewed in the cultural, psychological, historical, and literary context of her womanhood. The essays in this collection are dedicated to the continued exploration and definition of Dickinson's artistry. "Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson" heralds an exciting new vision of the work of a great poet. -- From publisher's description.