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  3. Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson's Master Hours

Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson's Master Hours

Marta Werner
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Winner of the 2023 Richard J. Finneran Award for the best book about editorial theory or practice.

For more than half a century, the story of Emily Dickinson’s “Master” documents has been the largely biographical tale of three letters to an unidentified individual. Writing in Time seeks to tell a different story—the story of the documents themselves. Rather than presenting the “Master” documents as quarantined from Dickinson’s larger scene of textual production, Marta Werner’s innovative new edition proposes reading them next to Dickinson’s other major textual experiment in the years between ca. 1858–1861: the Fascicles. In both, Dickinson can be seen testing the limits of address and genre in order to escape bibliographical determination and the very coordinates of “mastery” itself. A major event in Dickinson scholarship, Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson’s Master Hours proposes new constellations of Dickinson’s work as well as exciting new methodologies for textual scholarship as an act of “intimate editorial investigation.”

“The most important aspect of Werner’s editorial intervention — the aspect that will make a lasting contribution to Dickinson studies — is the print rendition of Dickinson’s handwritten texts, their ordering and their contextualization…Through this re-dynamization of Dickinson’s texts we thus get a glimpse into her thinking. We get to read less a series of discrete poems but the becoming of a poem. That is the most precious gift of Werner’s Writing in Time. —Branka Arsic, Columbia University

  • Cover
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Table of Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Archives & Scholarly Editions
  • Prologue: To the Reader
  • Historical Introduction: The Discovery, Transmission and Printing Histories of the “Master Letters”
  • Textual Introduction: From Letters to Documents: Imagining a New Edition of the “Master” Documents
  • Manuscript Witnesses & Transcriptions in Time
    • Dear Master / I am ill – (A 827)
    • Timeline, 1858–1860
    • Mute – thy Coronation – (A 825)
    • Timeline, 1860–1861
    • Oh ' did I offend it (A 829)
    • Timeline, Spring 1861
    • A wife – at Daybreak / I shall be – (A 826)
    • Timeline, Summer 1861
    • Master . / If you saw a bullet (A 828)
  • Reading Hours: Commentaries on the “Master” Documents
    • The Hour of Flowers: A 827
    • The Hour of Ermine: A 825
    • The Hour of Lead: A 829
    • The Midnight Hour: A 826
    • The Queen’s Hour: A 828
  • Appendix 1: Fascicled “Master” Poems
  • Appendix 2: A 826, Second Variant Version
  • Appendix 3: Additional Candidates for the “Master” Constellation, 1858–1861
  • Afterword: Interpretation in a New Key, by Jerome McGann
  • Works Cited & Further Reading
The complete manuscript of this work was subjected to a partly closed (“single-blind”) review process. For more information, please see our Peer Review Commitments and Guidelines.
Citable Link
Published: 2021
Publisher: Amherst College Press
Copyright: 2021
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license
ISBN(s)
  • 978-1-943208-19-7 (open access)
  • 978-1-943208-18-0 (paper)
Subject
  • LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry
Amherst College PressAmherst, MA

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