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  • Editorial NoteSpecial Issue: Networking Dickinson
  • Eliza Richards and Alexandra Socarides

Until recently, Dickinson’s writings have been considered uniquely detached from, rather than indicative or exemplary of, broader cultural currents. Now, however, critics are increasingly interested in exploring the ways that Dickinson’s work registered the circulation of a broad range of nineteenth-century ideas and practices, both elite and popular. Recent scholars have taken up Dickinson’s engagements with everything from minstrel music and newspaper reportage to legal disputes and economic theories. The essays in this issue investigate Dickinson’s relation to an array of nineteenth-century information networks.

Each of the first four essays presents a case study of a particular network through which Dickinson’s work circulated. Judith Scholes and Lara Cohen introduce us to contexts we have not previously associated with Dickinson, within which her poems gained new meanings. Scholes demonstrates the ways in which a female editor at the Springfield Republican enlisted Dickinson’s poems to serve her aim of establishing a politically engaged women’s aesthetic during the Civil War. Lara Cohen’s essay turns to a time after Dickinson’s death when one of her poems was integrated into the fantasy life of male teenage newspaper editors and their amateur publications. While Scholes and Lara Cohen focus on particular locations of circulation and exchange, Sarah Wadsworth and Michael Cohen attend to language itself in its networked dynamics. Wadsworth explores the ways in which Dickinson’s poems register a complex history of religious ideas that were transported through time and across occasions by what she calls a “meme-plex.” Taking as his starting point the anonymous publication of Dickinson’s “Success is counted sweetest” in A Masque of Poets, Michael Cohen traces the “alienating” and “alienated” qualities of poetic language that encourage authorial attribution to slip away in broader fabrics of communicative exchange. All of these essays challenge existing methodologies in Dickinson studies by decentering what has come to be understood as Dickinson’s brilliant exceptionalism. Instead of starting with Dickinson and moving out into the world around her, these essays prioritize the networks themselves, situating Dickinson within the systems on which so much of her writing has depended. These essays demonstrate the extent to which [End Page vi] context influences and even creates interpretations of Dickinson’s work, so that meaning occurs as a confluence of the interior workings of poems and their modes of circulation.

The issue concludes with two reflective pieces by Amy Earhart and Mary Loeffelholz on what it means “to network”—a term that has recently gained currency because of the digital revolution. What are the implications of networking methodologies for literary studies? What are the promises and pitfalls that accompany this new form of inquiry? As with all good thought pieces, these are meant to be suggestive and generative of future discussions, ones we hope scholars will pursue both inside and outside the pages of the Emily Dickinson Journal. [End Page vii]

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