19th-century American literary networks
A01=Paraic Finnerty
American literary adaptation of Shakespeare
American Shakespeare criticism
Author_Paraic Finnerty
Category=DSBF
Category=DSC
Cleopatra in American literature
comparative analysis of Dickinson and contemporaries
Dickinson and Hamlet
Dickinson and Macbeth
Dickinson and Othello
Dickinson and Romeo and Juliet
Dickinson and Shakespeare influence
Dickinson and Shakespearean female characters
Dickinson and theatrical performance
Dickinson correspondence study
Dickinson's creative engagement
Dickinson's engagement with theater
Dickinson's imaginative reading
Emily Dicki
Emily Dickinson cultural context
Emily Dickinson literary analysis
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
female appropriation of literary authority
gender and literature studies
Lady Macbeth influence
literary allusions to Shakespeare
literary clubs and Shakespeare discussion
literary periodicals and Shakespeare
nineteenth-century American reading culture
popular and highbrow reception of Shakespeare
Queen Margaret analysis
racial interpretation in 19th-century literature
reading practices in 1800s America
Shakespeare as moral and immoral dramatist
Shakespeare in 19th-century America
Shakespeare in American education
Shakespeare in diaries and marginalia
Shakespeare in early American letters
Shakespeare in newspapers
Shakespearean cultural authority
Shakespearean inspiration for American poets
Shakespearean literary reception
Shakespearean references in letters
transgressive female characters in Shakespeare
transgressive reading practices
women reading Shakespeare
Product details
- ISBN 9781558496705
- Weight: 447g
- Dimensions: 160 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 23 Sep 2008
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This book tells how Dickinson's fascination with Shakespeare informed her life and her poetry. One of the messages that Emily Dickinson wanted to communicate to the world was her great love of William Shakespeare - her letters abound with references to him and his works. This book explores the many implications of her admiration for the Bard.Paraic Finnerty clarifies the essential role that Shakespeare had in Dickinson's life by locating her allusions to his writings within a nineteenth-century American context and by treating reading as a practice that is shaped, to a large extent, by culture. In the process, he throws new light on Shakespeare's multifaceted presence in Dickinson's world: in education, theater, newspapers, public lectures, reading clubs, and literary periodicals.Through analysis of letters, journals, diaries, records, periodicals, newspapers, and marginalia, Finnerty juxtaposes Dickinson's engagement with Shakespeare with the responses of her contemporaries. Her Shakespeare emerges as an immoral dramatist and highly moral poet; a highbrow symbol of class and cultivation and a lowbrow popular entertainer; an impetus behind the emerging American theater criticism and an English author threatening American creativity; a writer culturally approved for women and yet one whose authority women often appropriated to critique their culture. Such a context allows the explication of Dickinson's specific references to Shakespeare and further conjecture about how she most likely read him.Finnerty also examines those of Dickinson's responses to Shakespeare that deviated from what might have been expected and approved of by her culture. Imaginatively departing from the commonplace, Dickinson chose to admire three of Shakespeare's most powerful and transgressive female characters - Cleopatra, Queen Margaret, and Lady Macbeth - instead of his more worthy and virtuous heroines. More startling, although the poet found resonance for her own life in Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth, she chose, in the racially charged atmosphere of nineteenth-century America, to identify with Shakespeare's most controversial character, Othello, thereby defying expectations once again.
PARAIC FINNERTY received his PhD from the University of Kent. He is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Portsmouth, England.
