Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare

Moving beyond a cisgender, heteronormative framework, this book investigates Shakespeare’s queer legacy on Emily Dickinson’s work, particularly how this legacy has inflected Dickinson’s queer world-making and her conception not only of gender and sexuality, but also of the lyric itself. Drawing on Francophone and Anglophone scholarship on lyric poetry as well as a wide range of academic research on Dickinson and Shakespeare, queer studies, intermedial studies and theatre studies, Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare: Queer Legacies and Queer World-Making argues that if Dickinson does indeed inscribe herself into a hegemonic white culture by tracing this Shakespearean legacy, she does so by exploring themes like deviance, a refusal of normativity in all its forms, and by complicating gender and racial constructions. Theatre, and Shakespearean theatricality in particular, is the spring of Dickinson’s lyric energy. As a transformative, open space, the theatre is the core structure that intersects with her poetry and the vital force that provides lyric momentum. It is what queers her conception of the lyric. This study contributes to existing scholarship on theories of the lyric by bringing previously untranslated French writing on the lyric to Anglophone readers for the first time, and by combining several critical and textual approaches.