"Siren Alps": The Lure of Europe for American Writers

Eberwein, Jane Donahue

doi:10.1353/edj.0.0064

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Several scholars have noticed the importance of exploring the contexts and connotations of Dickinson's toponyms (see Browner, 2004;Eberwein, 1996;Farr, 2004;Hamada, 1998;Palmer, 1976;and Silva Gruesz, 2004). In a discussion of "Emily Dickinson's Poetic Vocabulary," William Howard identifies several placenames, but he does not elaborate on their interpretation in Dickinson's poems.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emily Dickinson's Placenames

Nielson¹,

Hallen²

2006

names

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Emily Dickinson used at least 162 placenames, or toponyms, in her poetic vocabulary. Approximately 195 of Dickinson's 1,789 poems employ at least one placename, more than one tenth of the poetic corpus. Of the 162 placenames in Dickinson's poems, 70 refer to places in Europe, 17 to the Middle East, 12 each refer to Africa and North America, 11 each to Central America and Eurasia, 10 each to Asia and South America, and 1 reference each to Austronesia and the North Pole. In addition, Dickinson makes 7 references to sacred space and outer space. Dickinson refers to 29 different kinds of topographic entities: choronyms such as continents, oikonyms such as cities, oronyms such as mountains, hydronyms such as rivers, astronyms such as planets, and miscellaneous features such as languages, gardens, battle sites, or churches. The best resources for studying Dickinson's toponyms are Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (1828-1844) and the Oxford English Dictionary. To consolidate and augment the information in these and other resources, we have defined all of the toponyms in Dickinson's poetic lexicon for the forthcoming Emily Dickinson Lexicon.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emily Dickinson's Placenames

Nielson¹,

Hallen²

2006

names

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“…7. See Patterson (1979) and Eberwein (1996) for a more complete explication of these geographic and cultural contrasts. I am indebted to Karen Sanchez-Eppler's observation on the "imprecision" of cultural stereotyping in this poem, a comment she made to me in a workshopping session at the 2015 Dickinson Critical Institute in Amherst.…”

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confidence: 99%

Deep Mapping in Edward Hitchcock’s Geology and Emily Dickinson’s Poetry

Wry¹

2019

Textual Cultures

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The vernacular of deep mapping provides a valuable resource for comparing Edward Hitchcock’s geology textbooks — particularly Elementary Geology — with select geology-based poems by Emily Dickinson. Although Dickinson’s poems that reveal a clear understanding of nineteenth-century science (especially geological findings) have already been critically analyzed by scholars such as Richard Sewall, Hiroko Uno, and Robin Peel, Dickinson’s verse has not yet been assessed from the vantage point of the complex layerings of literary deep mapping. Moreover, Dickinson’s poetic explorations of distinct timelines and phenomena in both human and natural history can be aligned in many instances not only with the language of Hitchcock’s textbooks, but also with the drawings, maps, charts, and cultural contexts embedded in these volumes. The language, imagery, inquiries and conjectures in poems by Dickinson that are explicated in this essay all have clear (as well as more nuanced) ties to Hitchcock’s Geology. My study proposes that even with their different genres and diverse authorial intentions, both Hitchcock and Dickinson engage in similar rich and multivalent approaches to what is clearly an incipient version of modern deep mapping.

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