A Superior Spectre

Jeff is dying. Haunted by memories and grappling with the shame of his desires, he runs away to remote Scotland with a piece of experimental tech that allows him to enter the mind of someone in the past. Instructed to only use it three times, Jeff – self-indulgent, isolated and deteriorating – ignores this advice. In the late 1860s, Leonora lives a contented life in the Scottish Highlands, surrounded by nature, her hands and mind kept busy. Contemplating her future and the social conventions that bind her, a secret romantic friendship with the local laird is interrupted when her father sends her to stay with her aunt in Edinburgh – an intimidating, sooty city; the place where her mother perished. But Leonora’s ability to embrace her new life is shadowed by a dark presence that begins to lurk behind her eyes, and strange visions that bear no resemblance to anything she has ever seen or known… A Superior Spectre is a highly accomplished debut novel about our capacity for curiosity, and our dangerous entitlement to it, and reminds us the scariest ghosts aren’t those that go bump in the night, but those that are born and create a place for themselves in the human soul.

Although Emily Dickinson copied and bound her poems into manuscript notebooks, in the century since her death her poems have been read as single lyrics with little or no regard for the context she created for them in her fascicles. Choosing Not Choosing is the first book-length consideration of the poems in their manuscript context. Sharon Cameron demonstrates that to read the poems with attention to their placement in the fascicles is to observe scenes and subjects unfolding between and among poems rather than to think of them as isolated riddles, enigmatic in both syntax and reference. Thus Choosing Not Choosing illustrates that the contextual sense of Dickinson is not the canonical sense of Dickinson. Considering the poems in the context of the fascicles, Cameron argues that an essential refusal of choice pervades all aspects of Dickinson's poetry. Because Dickinson never chose whether she wanted her poems read as single lyrics or in sequence (nor is it clear where any fascicle text ends, or even how, in context, a poem is bounded), "not choosing" is a textual issue; it is also a formal issue because Dickinson refused to chose among poetic variants; it is a thematic issue; and, finally, it is a philosophical one, since what is produced by "not choosing" is a radical indifference to difference. Extending the readings of Dickinson offered in her earlier book Lyric Time, Cameron continues to enlarge our understanding of the work of this singular American poet.

The strange rhymes of Emily Dickinson's verse have offended some readers, attracted others, and proved a stumbling block for critics. In the first thorough analysis of the poet's rhyming practices, Judy Jo Small goes beyond simple classification and enumeration to reveal the aesthetic and semantic value of Dickinson's rhymes and show how they help shape the meaning of her lyrics. Considering Dickinson's rhyming technique in light of its historical context, Small argues that the poet's radical innovations were both an outgrowth of nineteenth-century aesthetics ideas about the music of poetry and a reaction against conventional constraints—not the least of which was the image of the female poet as a songbird pouring forth her soul's joys and sorrows in lyrical melody. Unlike other scholars, Small attaches special importance to Dickinson's own musical background. Revealing Dickinson's auditory imagination as a primary source of her poetic power, Small shows that sound is an important subject in the verse and that the phonetic texture contributes to the meaning. By looking closely at individual poems, Small demonstrates that Dickinson's deviations from "normal" rhyme schemes play a significant part in her artistic design: her modulations and dislocations of rhyme serve to structure the poems and contribute to their dynamic shifts of mood and meaning. Analyzing Dickinson's more daring experiments, Small shows how the poet achieved uncanny effects with fluctuating partial rhymes in some poems and with homonymic puns in others. It is in the interplay between the musical and the written aspects of Dickinson's language, Small contends, that her poetry comes alive. Small takes particular note of the use of rhyme at the ends of poems, illustrating Dickinson's brilliant effects in closing some poems decisively and in leaving others tantalizingly open-ended. Teaching us how to listen to Dickinson's poems and not simply to scrutinize them on paper,Positive as Soundis an innovative, lucidly written book that contributes not only to Dickinson scholarship but also to the general study of poetics.

Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved Them is a major new edition of Dickinson's verse intended for the scholar, student, and general reader. It foregrounds the copies of poems that Dickinson retained for herself during her lifetime, in the form she retained them. This is the only edition of Dickinson's complete poems to distinguish in easy visual form the approximately 1,100 poems she took pains to copy carefully onto folded sheets in fair hand--arguably to preserve them for posterity--from the poems she kept in rougher form or apparently did not retain. It is the first edition to include the alternate words and phrases Dickinson wrote on copies of the poems she retained. Readers can see, and determine for themselves, the extent to which a poem is resolved or fluid. With its clear and uncluttered pages, the volume recommends itself as a valuable resource for the classroom and to general readers. A Dickinson scholar, Cristanne Miller supplies helpful notes that gloss the poet's quotations and allusions and the contexts of her writing. Miller's Introduction describes Dickinson's practices in copying and circulating poems and summarizes contentious debates within Dickinson scholarship. Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved Them brings us closer to the writing practice of a crucially important American poet and provides new ways of thinking about Dickinson, allowing us to see more fully her methods of composing, circulating, and copying than previous editions have allowed. It will be valued by all readers of Dickinson's poetry.

Exploring the interrelatedness of the poetry of three American women writers

Arden Student Guides: Language and Writing offer a new type of study aid which combines lively critical insight with practical guidance on the critical writing skills you need to develop in order to engage fully with Shakespeare's texts. The books' core focus is on language: both understanding and enjoying Shakespeare's complex dramatic language, and expanding your own critical vocabulary, as you respond to his plays. Key features include: an introduction considering when and how the play was written, addressing the language with which Shakespeare created his work, as well as the generic, literary and theatrical conventions at his disposal detailed examination and analysis of the individual text, focusing on its literary, technical and historical intricacies discussion of performance history and the critical reception of the work a 'Writing matters' section in every chapter, clearly linking the analysis of Shakespeare's language to your own writing strategies in coursework and examinations. Written by world-class academics with both scholarly insight and outstanding teaching skills, each guide will empower you to read and write about Shakespeare with increased confidence and enthusiasm. At a climactic point in the play, Macbeth realises that the witches have deceived him through their ambiguous language: 'they palter with us in a double sense'. This book explores Shakespeare's own paltering in the play – the densely rich language of ambition, of blood, and of guilt that structures Macbeth.