1. Consider the process of fascicle-making beside the process of commercial book production in mid-19th century America and, specifically, New England. What materials were used in the mass production of books? What was the cost of these materials? What was the standard number of copies printed of a book of poetry? Did authors, publishers, and printers work collaboratively in the production of books? How much "authority" did the author have concerning the arrangement and the design of the final product? How were books advertised and circulated? What copyright laws were in place during the 1850s and 1860s? What did they protect? How did the process of commercial publishing differ from the process of self-publication? What are the implications of this difference? It would be useful to focus on the Boston publishing firm of Roberts Brothers, Dickinson's first publisher. Build a supplementary file with links to Web 1 on this publishing firm (and, possibly, on the various publishing firms that turned down the opportunity to publish Dickinson's poetry). Include as much information as possible on the publication terms for the First, Second, and Third Series of Dickinson's Poems (1890, 1891, 1896). Build a file of the correspondence among the editors and publishers of Dickinson's poems and letters.
2. Consider various models of 19th-century textual production that may have influenced Dickinson in her initial attempts at book making, including the sketchbook, portfolio, scrapbook, album, and herbarium. Search the archives--actual and virtual--for examples of portfolio poetry and/or scrapbook poetry and scan or download the relevant documents into a supplementary file with links to the Web 1. In what ways do Dickinson's fascicles resemble these popular Victorian forms of textual production? In what ways do they declare their difference from these forms? Was Dickinson influenced by other, more radical 19th-century forms of textual production, such as Whitman's Leaves of Grass? Compose textual and critical introductions for the materials you decide to add to the site in which you discuss both the cultural artifacts themselves and their relationship to Dickinson's work.
3. The introduction of variant readings into the fascicles in fascicle 5 is one of Dickinson's most radical textual moves. In a file linked to Web 1, catalog (chronologically) and then analyze the different ways in which Dickinson displays variant readings in the fascicles. Compare Dickinson's displays of variant readings with displays in the Johnson and Franklin variorum editions. Experiment with various different ways of displaying and encoding variants and analyze the advantages and drawbacks of the different displays.
4. By 1861--perhaps earlier--the internal structure of individual fascicles is becoming more complex. At the same time, there may be a corresponding increase in complexity in the relations between and among fascicles. Analyze the relations among the poems in a single fascicle. Which poems act as "strange attractors" within the fascicle? Are there poems that cannot be accounted for? Analyze the relations among two or more fascicles. Fascicles 15 and 16 offer especially rich ground for an exploration of autonomy and intertextuality. Build a file with links to Web 1 in which you explore the links between and among poems in a single fascicle as well as between and among two or more fascicles. Remember that you can, for the sake of your argument, rearrange the poems in the fascicles. Just be sure to let viewers know that you are reconstructing the contents of the fascicles to point out connections within and between/among them
5. Fascicle 34 contains some of Dickinson's most powerful poems on poetry ("My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun," "These - saw Visions -," "Essential Oils - are wrung") and on the possibilities and limits of literary community ("Bereavement in their death to feel"; "These - saw Visions"; and "Strong Draughts of Their Refreshing Minds"). Consider fascicle 34 as a scene of collaboration between Dickinson and the other poets she read. Build a file of poems by other writers (Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, George Eliot, Emily and Charlotte Bronte) Dickinson knew and comment on their possible relations to the poems in fascicle 34. It may be necessary to make use of Dickinson's library here--to study both the copies of the books she had and the markings she made in those books. Define Dickinson's attitude towards literary community as it is expressed in this fascicle. Compare these distant "acts" of collaboration with the nearer acts of collaboration with Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson.
6. Fascicle 2 has suffered mutilation. Research the history of the mutilation of this fascicle: when was the fascicle mutilated, what specific forms did the mutilation take, who was responsible for the mutilations, how was the fascicle reconstructed? Compare the mutilations in fascicle 2 with the mutilations found in Dickinson's late drafts. Build a file in which you inventory and analyze the mutilated manuscripts in Dickinson's oeuvre. Analyze the efforts mounted to restore damaged or mutilated manuscripts. Variant/addition: Research censorship laws in the 19th century. What was subject to censorship? Was the censorship of Dickinson's manuscripts simply a private matter, or was it in some sense indicative of larger, cultural patterns of censorship? What other forms of censorship were Dickinson's manuscripts subjected to when they entered print culture? Create a file in which you review the censorship laws--and relevant cases involving literary censorship--on the books in 19th century America.
Sets
1. In the 1890s, Dickinson's editors, Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, dismantled the fascicles and rearranged the poems into editorially determined categories. Look at he poems in one or more of Dickinson's fascicles and compare Dickinson's arrangement of the poems with her editors' arrangement in Poems, First and Second series. In The Textual Condition, Jerome McGann writes, "To edit a text is to be situated in a historical relation to the work's transmissions, but it is also to be placed in an immediate relation to contemporary cultural and conceptual goals" (47). In what ways does the editing of Emily Dickinson's writings confirm McGann's statement?
Fascicles, Sets, & Fragments
1. Dickinson scholars often use the terms "early," "middle," and "late" to refer to Dickinson's style periods. Yet so far there has been very little subtle analysis of the three style periods??the elements characteristic of each??and still less analysis of the causes for the transitions from one style period to another and of the dynamic interplay of early, middle, and late style elements in her poems and letters. Build a website in which a rigorous analysis of these style periods is undertaken. *(It would be easy to modify this assignment to make its focus a single "correspondence," say, the poems and letters to SHGD or TWH.)
2. A reader enters the scene of composition belatedly--long after the author's departure. Dickinson's writing table, a small mahogany desk eighteen inches square with a single drawer just deep enough for ink pots and stationery, stands cleared of unruly remains, exorcized of ambiguities. It appears before us like a blank page. Yet Dickinson's manuscripts, the material witnesses of her aesthetic itinerary, offer striking testimony about the spectacular turbulence and commotion-the pandemonium-that attended the act of composition. Reconstruct Dickinson's "desk" at one or more particular moments in her writing life. Suggestions: You may choose to reconstruct Dickinson's desk at the moment when she first writes to TWH. You may choose to reconstruct the desk at the moment(s) during which Dickinson wrote and revised, with SHGD's input, "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers."
