Editorial Note
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In August, 2004 the Emily Dickinson International Society sponsored its fifth international conference, "Emily Dickinson: Realms of Amplitude," in Hilo, Hawaii. In a bayside setting lush with tropical flowers, palms and banyan trees, conference attendees explored the amplitude that Dickinson reveals in her writings. Thirty miles away in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, a magnificent zone of rain forests, black rock, and white steam, we witnessed an active volcano and walked on the lava that Dickinson imagined as "hissing corals"—another kind of amplitude.
The conference addressed the significance of amplitude—the excessive, extravagant, exotic, and wide-ranging—as an aspect of Dickinson's writing and as a trope for the experience of reading her work. Conference sessions focused on major realms of amplitude in her work: the body, nature, the erotic, spirituality, and language. Other sessions explored the more general theme of New Areas in Dickinson Studies, including Dickinson and nineteenth-century science, Dickinson and a series of other writers, new directions in editing, and sound structures and metrics in Dickinson's poetry.
This issue of The Emily Dickinson Journal offers highlights from that memorable conference: exploring various aspects of Dickinson's amplitude.
Suzane Juhasz is Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her publications on Dickinson include Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson (edited; Indiana), The Undiscovered Continent: Emily Dickinson and the Space of the Mind (Indiana), and Comic Power in Emily Dickinson (coauthored; Texas). She was the founding editor of the Emily Dickinson Journal (1992-2000).
