Project MUSE®: The Emily Dickinson Journal - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/56
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Emily Dickinson Journal.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1992) through current issueLatest Articles: The Emily Dickinson JournalTWOProject MUSE®The Emily Dickinson Journal1096-858X1059-6879Latest articles in The Emily Dickinson Journal. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981220
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Play is for children, or so I was raised to believe. The preponderance of play theory, which focuses on children’s play, reinforces this belief and distinguishes between studying play for its own sake and what is commonly called “serious” play, that is, play that, as a matter of practice, advances some other purpose or end-result, such as learning, cultural cohesion, or creative production. Two interdisciplinary scholarly journals devoted to the subject are Play & Culture Studies, an annual produced by the Association for the Study of Play, and the American Journal of Play, published three times a year by The Strong: National Museum of Play. A foundational contemporary text is Brian Sutton-Smith’s The Ambiguity of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/56/image/coversmallIntroduction2026-01-24text/htmlen-USIntroduction2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®332502026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24Playful Ecopoetics: Pressed Flowers as Lyric Subject
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981221
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Emily Dickinson’s love of flowers is well-known. According to Paula Bennett, in Dickinson’s poems “there are approximately 400 references to flowers or their parts, such as ‘stem’ and ‘sepal’” (116). She specifically used flowers as metaphors, describing them or meditating on their beauty and transience. For Dickinson, flowers also were gifts and, like her words, were used to fulfill a variety of functions from consoling to delighting. She often sent flowers along with her letters and poems to those with whom she corresponded throughout her life. Pressed flowers included with letters illuminate the material underpinnings of Dickinson’s poetics—how the artifact contains a message as vital as the words of enclosed
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/56/image/coversmallPlayful Ecopoetics: Pressed Flowers as Lyric Subject2026-01-24text/htmlen-USPlayful Ecopoetics: Pressed Flowers as Lyric Subject2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®1097932026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24“Vesuvius dont talk”: Emily Dickinson’s Sputtering Volcanoes
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981222
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Vesuvius dont talk - Etna - dont -
They said ^2^ a syllable - one ^1^ of them - a thousand years ago, and Pompeii heard it, and hid forever - She could’nt look the world in the face, afterward - I suppose - Bashful Pompeii!Emily Dickinson’s reference to Vesuvius in her summer 1861 “Master” document pictures volcanic eruption in terms of talking, or, in this case, not talking.1 A few scholars have noted this particular moment as evidence of her “exploding the language by which her culture seeks to limit and define her” (Denman 23) and that the “volcano is her symbol for passion suppressed, not only love but rage” (Farr 213). I begin this essay here because Dickinson’s characterization of Vesuvius in her “Master”
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/56/image/coversmall“Vesuvius dont talk”: Emily Dickinson’s Sputtering Volcanoes2026-01-24text/htmlen-US“Vesuvius dont talk”: Emily Dickinson’s Sputtering Volcanoes2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®1388362026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24But How Do You Know? Immateriality, Improvised Play, and Emily Dickinson
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981223
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Emily Dickinson was a dedicated, lifelong, astute student and committed amateur practitioner of music, a commitment that was crucial to her writing. Not so long ago, that would have been a controversial statement. How could readers of her posthumous publications know? On what basis might a literary critic make and support such a statement? For most of the critical history of her work, the opposite was believed to be true. She was assumed to be musically naïve, in line with the critical and public consensus, beginning with Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Preface to the 1890 Poems, that understood Dickinson to have been a largely housebound recluse, rejecting a world that had disappointed her in love or professional
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/56/image/coversmallBut How Do You Know? Immateriality, Improvised Play, and Emily Dickinson2026-01-24text/htmlen-USBut How Do You Know? Immateriality, Improvised Play, and Emily Dickinson2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®1629572026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24The Literary Gift in Early America by David Faflik (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981224
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The Literary Gift in Early America opens with David Faflik’s promise to provide “an alternative way . . . to think about the semantics of literary circulation in early America” (1). “Semantics,” in his usage, refers to ways “human interactions” surrounding literary works generate the dimensions not only of their meaning but also, to some extent, their form. His “alternative way” is to argue that “how a work of literature reaches readers . . . influences what that work ‘means’” (235). The study of how each author engaged these “cultures of gifting” adds to the way we understand literary production (235). Faflik’s book will be of interest to anyone studying the history of publication; the history of gift exchange;
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/56/image/coversmallThe Literary Gift in Early America by David Faflik (review)2026-01-24text/htmlen-USThe Literary Gift in Early America by David Faflik (review)2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®126032026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24