Extending the critical discussion which has focused on the hymns of Isaac Watts as an influence on Emily Dickinson's poetry, this study brings to bear the hymnody of Dickinson's female forbears and contemporaries and considers Isaac Watts' position as a Dissenter for a fuller understanding of Dickinson's engagement with hymn culture.
Bringing to bear the hymnody of Dickinson's female forbears and contemporaries and the Dissenting ideology found in Isaac Watts's hymns, this study offers a critical intervention in Dickinson's use of the hymn form. Dickinson's use of bee imagery and the re-visioned notions of religious design in her 'alternative hymns' show her engaging with a community of hymn writers in ways that anticipate the ideas of feminist theologians.
'... a solid, original work of scholarship. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.' Choice '... this book offers a new way of considering some of Dickinson's visionary poems about the natural world, and it opens up the hitherto scarcely touched field of women's hymnody.' The New England Quarterly '... an engaging study...' Modern Language Review 'Victoria N. Morgan brilliantly extends the discussion of the poet's "religious speculation in poetic form"... showing that Dickinson wrestled not only with the language of science, but Christianity as well.' Times Literary Supplement 'It is a pleasure to read a book as informed, intelligent, and comfortable as Victoria N. Morgan's Emily Dickinson and Hymn Culture. Drawing on feminist theology and French theory, Morgan places Dickinson in the context of women hymn writers and describes Dickinson's positive inheritance from Isaac Watts as well as her rejection of his hierarchical relationship to the divine - accomplishing all these things in order to depict Dickinson as a writer of alternative hymns, deeply immersed in nineteenth-century hymn culture.' Emily Dickinson Journal 'This wide-ranging book focusses on the similarities between Emily Dickinson's poetic forms and the main traditions of evangelical Protestant hymnody in order to offer a full interpretation of both Dickinson's poetry and her religious convictions. Earlier scholarship had stressed the way in which Dickinson's apparently conscious use of standard hymn forms enabled her to subvert the conventional Christianity found in the hymns of main authors like Isaac Watts. Morgan argues that the relationship is much more complex. [...] because it also provides much insight concerning Dickinson's interaction with a wide range of hymns as well as concerning the resonances of her own poems against hymn traditions, patient attention is amply rewarded. [...] Even more interesting is her consideration of how the poet'
