Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries

Catalog description

A study of the poems and letters of Emily Dickinson, including her contemporaries and those she influenced. Through literary analysis and creative activities, we study how Dickinson’s poems create rhetorical situations and act as vehicles for artistic expression and social concern. The course explores poetic form and contemporary lyric theory as well as various topics, such as media and the Civil War, elegies and nineteenth-century consolatory fictions, religious discourse, literary celebrity, the construction of gender and racial identity, and the biopic. Writers may include Whitman, Emerson, Keats, George Eliot, Tennyson, the Brontës, the Brownings, Moore, Bishop, and Frost.