Religion Around Emily Dickinson

Abstract

This is the second volume in an ambitious series from Pennsylvania State University Press entitled “Religion Around.” The series applies the New Historicism to literary and cultural figures of various times, places, and genres. The first effort by series editor Peter Iver Kaufman explored religious ideas, writers, and debates revolving around Shakespeare. Future proposed additions to the series may focus on various cultural figures such as Dante, Edward Gibbon, and Walter Scott, or Langston Hughes, Billie Holliday, Allen Ginsberg, and Sting. The series aspires to shed light on the religious ideas that shaped the selected iconic life and creative work while also considering ways that individual subjects contributed to and resisted, perhaps in previously unrecognized ways, the religious movements and debates swirling around them. The works carve out a new genre, resisting the forms of more traditional biographies, religious histories, literary histories, and literary criticisms at the same time they mine those secondary sources to analyze “religion around.”