As its title suggests, this collection brings together a range of interpretive perspectives on the forty handmade manuscript books—usually called “fascicles”—found among the papers of Emily Dickinson (1830–86) after her death. Following the launch of the digital Emily Dickinson Archive in the fall of 2013, this timely volume is the first edited collection to focus specifically on the fascicles, a subfield of Dickinson manuscript studies. Because Dickinson preferred not to publish her work via the conventional print means and because she left behind such an extraordinary body of work, scholars have attended with particular care to her handwritten manuscripts, arguing that their variant words, idiosyncratic spellings, line breaks, and dashes can offer important insights into the writer's creative process or alternative ways of interpreting the poems.
Following the 1981 publication of The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, a photo facsimile edition of all of the poems Dickinson sewed into...
