Editor’s Note

Dickinson has long been of interest to scholars and translators of poetry in Japan. In the last decades, Dickinson studies have also become increasingly lively in other parts of Asia, resulting in several new translations of her poetry (for example, into Chinese) and new scholarship. Scholars around the world are also now exploring more ways in which Dickinson both concerns herself with Asia and speaks to aesthetic, philosophical, and spiritual values more dominant in Asia than in the West. This issue presents some of these new approaches—appropriately following up on the stimulating “Emily Dickinson World Citizen” EDIS conference held at the University of Maryland in August. We look forward to publishing some of the exciting research presented at that conference in the coming year.

Exciting is also the news that a new online site presenting images of Dickinson’s manuscript poems free and open to the public went live on October 23, 2013: The Emily Dickinson Archive <http://www.edickinson.org/> (EDA) will make high-resolution images of manuscripts of Dickinson’s poetry available in open access, along with transcriptions and annotations from historical and scholarly editions. The first release of the EDA will focus on the corpus of poems identified in R. W. Franklin’s 1998 The Poems of Emily Dickinson. The long-term goal of this digital archive is to gather in one site high-resolution images of all surviving Dickinson autograph poetry manuscripts and letters; contemporary transcripts of Dickinson poems and letters that do not survive in autograph; and a historical array of editors’ attempts to transcribe those autograph materials in printed form. A collaboration between the Frost Library at Amherst College, the Boston Public Library, Harvard University Press and the Houghton Library at Harvard, and several other institutions holding Dickinson manuscripts, The Emily Dickinson Archive is designed to inspire new scholarship and discourse on this literary icon.

The Spring 2014 Journal brings a special issue on “Networking Dickinson,” edited by Eliza Richards and Alexandra Socarides. Richards and Socarides will also serve as interim editors of the EDJ during the Spring of 2014, while I am on leave. Come mid-summer “Then - look for me - ” back at my regular post.